Jurassic World
by The Geeky Zoologist
Summary: A darker re-imagining of Jurassic World. After 12 years of existence, the theme park Jurassic World is thriving and a major family destination. But behind the scenes, the behavioural problems of the Indominus rex raise concern while Mount Sibo, Isla Nublar's volcano, might be a ticking time bomb and at the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur and the risk to survival is severe.
1. Opening Scroll

**Disclaimer: I do not own the Jurassic Park franchise or its characters, but I own this story and my OC's.**

 **Since English is not my first language, I apologise in advance for the eventual language-related errors.**

 **I hope nonetheless that you will enjoy the read and if you do, don't hesitate to let me know in the review section.**

* * *

 _In May 1997, when worldwide media showed footage of an adult tyrannosaur rampaging through San Diego, humanity realized that dinosaurs walked once again the Earth._  
 _It soon learned that there was an entire ecosystem thriving on an island off the coast of Costa Rica, Isla Sorna, and that this miracle was due to advances in genetics by the InGen corporation, founded by John Hammond._  
 _Despite a speech in which he encouraged to not disturb this lost world, Hammond couldn't prevent the public opinion from taking an interest on the island while InGen, weakened like never before, was on the verge of bankruptcy._

 _Faced with the insufficient means provided by the United Nations to monitor the island and fearing for the future of his legacy, Hammond summoned one of his closest friends, the Indian billionaire Simon Masrani._  
 _Just before he died, he bequeathed him InGen and asked him to find a way to protect the prehistoric fauna of Sorna from outside interferences._

 _At the dawn of the 21st century, Masrani turned his attention to another Costa Rican island owned by InGen, Isla Nublar._  
 _Abandoned since the escape of the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, no one has returned there for years but Masrani had big plans for the island..._


	2. Prologue

On that morning of September 2002, the loose soil covered with dead leaves and the trees attacked by climbing plants were bathed in the humidity of the jungle while the canopy rustled with the wind.

Its rings wrapped around a branch of a Kapok tree more than fifteen meters above the ground, a Boa constrictor was inert.  
Waiting for the arrival of the sun's rays on its cold body, the reptile was digesting a tree frog, which it had caught during its hunting night.  
The boa had not reached its adult size yet: it was only one meter and twenty centimetres long where the largest members of its species could reach more than four meters.  
It could have reached that size if Death had not hit it so soon.

It felt the claws of a huge bird dug into his flesh and before it had time to retaliate, a powerful beak pierced its skull.

The snake's body was raised before being laid at the top of the crown of a larger tree that dominated the others by its size.  
The animal that killed the boa was a grey-headed bird of prey with a black plumage on its back and white on the underside: A Harpy eagle, one of the largest predators of the New World's rainforests.

Before beginning its meal, the bird of prey looked around it while below, many calls and songs resounded under the shade of the trees.  
The day had risen three hours ago and the diurnal animals living in the undergrowth had already started their daily activities, including hunting.  
But the harpy was the undisputed master of this jungle's skies and nothing would have dared to steal its meal without taking the risk of suffering the raptor's fury and become in turn a potential prey.

Carefree, the harpy began to feast on the flesh of the snake but during its meal, the jungle became silent.

A flock of white birds flew away from a nearby tree, screaming, and passed by the one where the bird of prey was perched without paying attention to it while a dull and repeated sound was getting closer.

Alerted, the harpy raised its head and closed its grip around the body of the reptile.  
It looked in the direction of the noise but saw nothing beyond the mist that was so thick that even the sharp eyes of the raptor could barely distinguish anything beyond a dozen of meters.

The noise was getting closer and louder, almost deafening for the harpy.

Suddenly, a gigantic tapered, khaki creature pierced the mist, flying just a few feet above the canopy, shaking the branches beneath it.  
Its eyes were huge, the tail was long and the skin had a hard, smooth appearance while the wings were turning so fast that the bird of prey couldn't see its precise outlines.  
Frightened by this unknown monster which had just burst onto its territory, scaring all the animals of the canopy in its wake, the harpy flew with the body of the boa between its claws and fled.

X

When the khaki _AgustaWestland AW101_ helicopter emerged from the cloud of mist covering a large part of the jungle, one of the lateral door was slid and a man pulled his head from inside the aircraft.  
Wearing fatigues and a headset on his head, he scanned the jungle around while chewing his gum.

He saw trees moving two hundred meters from their position and turned to inform the pilot about it:

"There's movement at eleven o'clock!"

The pilot nodded and the helicopter took the direction of the moving trees while the other spoked in his microphone:

"Ground team, I spotted the target. It's at the base of the foothills and tries to get back to the mountain."

He was speaking of a mountain with a bare top and jagged edges, behind him in the east.

" _Okay, we're heading to its position,_ " someone answered in the headset.

X

On the ground, the low-lying plants on the forest floor were crushed on the passage of a small group of speeding all-terrain vehicles, all khaki-coloured and sporting the grey logo of InGen on their doors.  
There were several _Hummer H1_ and _Jeep Wrangler_ as well as a _Mercedes-Benz U1300_ with a cage in which two men were standing, dressed in fatigues just like all those participating in the operation that was going on.  
In addition to a shooter equipped with a _Lindstradt_ rifle, there was also one who led the operation by giving orders through his microphone and making large gestures distinct with his hands.

Victor Hoskins, or Vic as he was nicknamed, was a stout man in his forties and had a military haircut with short brown hair.  
As his cut and ease of command suggested, Hoskins was a former member of the US Army Special Forces.

By enlisting himself at the age of seventeen, he wanted to follow the example of his father, a G.I., killed in an ambush in Vietnam.  
Vic had been involved in several conflicts, including the Panama's invasion in 1989, the Gulf War, and the two United Nations peacekeeping operations in Somalia, lasting from 1992 to 1993.  
It was in Panama that he met his ex-wife, also part of the army and they had a daughter, born in 1991.  
However, he left the army after being badly injured during the Battle of Mogadishu and going from bad to worse, Hoskins went through a period of unemployment in the middle of which he divorced from his wife, one year after Mogadishu.

What was a dark period for him came to an end in early 1995 when he was hired by InGen to fill the position of an executive of the company's security division who died a few months earlier on an expedition that the company had sent on an island one hundred and ninety-three kilometres off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, Isla Nublar, the same where Hoskins and his men had been busy for more than seven months.  
When he was told what _InGen_ had left behind on this island and on Isla Sorna, Hoskins did not believe his ears.  
The company he was working for had cloned dinosaurs, which escaped during a hurricane and proliferated against all odds, but several years passed before Hoskins would have a prehistoric animal in flesh before his very eyes.  
He should have also participated to Operation Harvest on Isla Sorna in May 1997 but a car accident prevented him to do so, which given the grim fate that fell on many of those who went there, saved his life indirectly.

In August 2001, he had been summoned by the board of directors which charged him with a delicate mission.  
Following an incursion by imprudent tourists on Sorna, pteranodons had been released from their aviary and soldiers on board of the US Navy helicopters sent rescuing the survivors had seen them fly to new horizons.  
No one knew where they were going but they represented a risk if they came to settle near an inhabited area and the pterosaurs had to either be captured or killed if necessary.  
Hoskins assembled a small team and together they tracked the pteranodons across the Pacific coast of the North American continent for three months using testimonies collected in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, California, Oregon and the Washington State, up to the Canadian border.  
The pteranodons were only stopped in November at Horseshoe Bay, a locality north of Vancouver, more than five thousand six hundred kilometres from their birthplace, through the concerted effort of Hoskins team, the Canadian police and a local wildlife control office.  
To save a young boy captured by the pteranodons and taken to their nests, Hoskins had no choice but to shoot the animals and he was immediately surprised by the fact that the locals considered him a hero whereas he had only done what the board described as a "cleaning operation".  
Like the San Diego incident, the Horseshoe Bay's one hit the headlines, although the damage and casualties, two deaths and three seriously injured persons, were much smaller and the impact was more political than material or human, questioning the effectiveness of Isla Sorna's confinement by the United Nations.

Sometime later, Simon Masrani contacted Hoskins to offer him to be the chief of security of the huge project that Masrani Global and its subsidiaries would undertake on Isla Nublar for InGen.  
If Hoskins successfully carried out his mission, the Indian billionaire would ensure that he would be appointed head of InGen's security division and the ex-serviceman could then enjoy an enviable lifestyle.  
Thus, less than a year after the pteranodons' attack in Canada, Hoskins was directing a capture operation of the utmost importance.

While watching the jungle in front of him through the bars of the cage, he ordered:

"He's soon on us. Get in formation!"

The vehicles organized themselves to form an arc with the _U1300_ in the center and the jeeps and hummers on the wings, then stopped.  
A few dozen meters in front of the vehicles, something big was making its way through the jungle, cracking branches under its feet.

"Wait!" Hoskins said.

A tree fell and one began to hear the raspy breath of a large animal.  
The men began to get nervous and the shooter in the cage held his rifle firmly against him.

"Don't forget that the big boss ordered us to capture him alive," Hoskins reminded him.

The animal they had to capture was coming closer and there was a deathly hush among the men.

"You wait!" Hoskins repeated.

The animal was twenty meters away, then fifteen, then ten, and its pungent smell reached Hoskins' nostrils.

As their target was about to pierce the wall of vegetation separating it from the vehicles, Hoskins bellowed into his microphone:

"Now!"

On board of one of the vehicles, a grey box-like device was activated, producing a sort of high-pitched whistling.  
Those who did not wear earmuffs covered their ears with their hands and the massive animal turned around with a short, plaintive roar, bothered by the ultrasound produced.  
Its long, scaly, brown tail passed over the cage, raising a swearing from the shooter, and Hoskins, speechless following his brief face to face with the animal, watched it flee.

He gave new orders:

"Enveloping maneuver! Everyone stick close to him! Drive him out of the jungle!"

The vehicles started quickly and chased the animal to force it to go in the desired direction, to the west, where the jungle was less dense.  
While adrenaline rushed through their bodies, the men in the vehicles couldn't help but to look at the animal.

Biped, thirteen meters long and five meters high, huge jaws counterbalanced by a thick and rigid tail, clawed three-legged feet ending powerful legs, it was a creature that the average person considered extinct since millions of years a few years earlier.  
It was a dinosaur and not just one from any species: A _Tyrannosaurus rex_ , the king of dinosaurs.  
The individual that Hoskins and his men were chasing was actually a female although he and his subordinates spoke of her by saying "he". Others nicknamed her "The Queen in the North" in reference to the fact that the dinosaur roamed mainly in the northern half of the island.  
They had learned through the hard way that the tyrannosaur hated intruders and many times the dinosaur had fiercely defended its territory against human incursions and as long as she was free, the construction sites that had started to be undertaken on the margins of her territory were frozen.

Annoyed by the human's harassment, the tyrannosaur kept growling ferociously at them and even tried to bite the hood of one of the Jeeps, which was then too close to Hoskins' taste.

"Keep your distance, dammit!" He muttered into the microphone.

But the dinosaur gave a violent head blow to the vehicle that swerved, threatening to go straight into a tree.  
The jeep then made a sharp turn to avoid it but rolling on a big root, it turned on its side and stopped.

"Continue the chase, we're almost there!" Hoskins said after looking at the jeep behind him.

X

Inside the helicopter, the shooter grabbed his airgun and opened a box containing several hypodermic darts.  
He took one and loaded the rifle with it before sitting on the edge and spotting the tyrannosaur.  
A hundred yards ahead, the jungle gave way to meadows and when he saw a brown shape moving under the trees, the shooter took aim and once it was in his line of sight, he pulled the trigger.  
The shooter felt the rifle's recoil against his shoulder and saw the pink tassel of the dart disappear almost instantly in the middle of the foliage.  
He waited a few seconds but the animal showed no sign of slackening.

X

As they continued the chase, Hoskins saw the tassel stuck into a trunk.  
He informed the shooter:

"You missed the target."

X

The shooter reloaded his rifle and following the dinosaur through the gun sights, saw it exiting the jungle by spreading the palm trees on its path.  
Being thus exposed, the tyrannosaur became an easy target and the shooter did not miss it.

The dart went to get stuck itself in the neck of the dinosaur, which roared plaintively in reaction.  
Passing above the T. rex standing in the fog, the shooter saw the vehicles bursting out of the jungle and describing large circles while spotlights were pointed on her.

X

From the safety of the cage, Hoskins saw the animal shake his head and heard him snort.  
A few minutes later, while it was still surrounded, the tyrannosaur began to stagger and wobble.  
Knowing that the tranquilizer was starting to take effect, Hoskins motioned his men to move away.  
Split between fear and fascination, they watched the tyrannosaur slowly yielding to sleep.

X

When another group of vehicles, including a grey livestock truck, arrived on the scene, the tranquilized animal was already lying on its side and breathing slightly while two armed men watched it closely.  
In addition to the truck, there were two hummers, a tipper containing transport equipment, a _712 M Pinzgauer_ and a white _Mercedes Unimog_ with a red caduceus logo reading " _Isla Nublar Veterinary Services_ ".  
A veterinarian and her two assistants came out and immediately came examine the tyrannosaur whereas a dozen of men and women in light coloured field clothes were getting off the Pinzgauer to unload the equipment in the tipper.  
Having made sure that the tyrannosaur was in good health, the vet gestured to the truck to come forward and touched the T. rex _'_ s snout, feeling the rough skin under her plastic glove.

A transport net was passed under the tyrannosaur, which had been pushed so that it laid on its stomach.  
The net was hooked to the slings of a hovering flying crane and slowly, the body of the dinosaur rose in the air towards the livestock truck that had been designed to be able to contain and transport an adult tyrannosaur _.  
_ The removable roof of the truck opened and the flying crane gently placed the tyrannosaur inside the truck where the slings were seized to unhook them from the net.  
As the noise of the flying crane moved away, those inside the truck fixed the huge inert body to a platform on the bottom with solid straps.  
When it was done, everyone went out and closed the heavy doors, letting the light of the day reach the _tyrannosaur_ only through the thin openings left within the metal walls.

Her film camera in hand, Eduarda Mena was wandering among the vehicles parked in the grass, filming everything that was of interest to her.  
Close to Hoskins' age, short curly brown hair, dressed in a white tank top and beige trousers, Mena was in charge of filming the operations on Nublar and there was only one thing she couldn't wait to do: Looking at the footage she had filmed aboard one of hummers during the chase and the capture of the tyrannosaur.  
Thinking again about it, she had chills but having been a war reporter, she was used to thrills and had even taken taste of them over time.

When she passed her camera in front of a small group of hunters joking, they looked at her and one of them said:

"Hey guys, say hello to Leni Riefenstahl's camera."

They waved hands at the lens.

"What did I tell you? Avoid doing this comparison please," she retorted in a friendly tone.

Mena walked towards the truck.

The closer she came, the more the dinosaur's breathing, like the noise produced by the bellows of a forge, became louder.  
She looked inside the container and put the lens of her camera in front of one of the openings.

"I cannot wait to see your footage, Edu," Hoskins said behind her back. "It must be fantastic."

"I hope so, Vic."

She turned to him.

"It's not like I am entitled to a second take," she added jokingly.

"You are aware that if you filmed like someone with Parkinson's, I wouldn't have talked to Masrani about you."

Hoskins and Mena were long-time friends.  
They had met during the Gulf War and kept in touch ever since.  
When Hoskins had learned that Masrani was looking for someone to film the progress of his project on Nublar, he naturally told him about Mena.

"Speaking of him, I will have to call and inform him that his star is within our walls," he said.

Hoskins turned to face all the people scattered around the vehicles:

"Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?"

All interrupted their discussions and came closer.

"You did a good job today… at least most of you at least, isn't it Lambert?" He said in a teasing tone at the driver of the crashed jeep, a black man in his fifties, sitting on one of the hoods, looking sore. "But I'm proud of you. Tonight, rounds are on me!"

The assembly applauded and uttered exclamations of contentment.

"Come on, let's drag this moveable feast away!" Hoskins said as a conclusion to his speech.

He made his way to one of the hummers, sat behind the wheel and put the key on the ignition while Mena got in the back and the vehicles were prepared for leaving.

Once they were all ready, Hoskins's Hummer took the lead of the convoy and drove northward first before encountering an old asphalt road, a black band partly hidden under the grass, and then turning west, towards The Embrace, the name given by the natives of Isla Nublar, the Tun-Si, to a large valley three kilometres deep bounded by two mountain arcs forming a cirque around a patchwork of groves and verdurous meadows that stretched under the cloudy sky.  
On their left, they quickly encountered the remains of an old three and a half meters high electrical fence that followed the road and whose wires were rusted and some pylons lying.

As they drove through the valley, Hoskins looked briefly into the central mirror and saw one of his men reading a paperback copy of _The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers_ while Mena checked her gear.  
At the end of the valley, they turned left and took a tunnel to pass under the southern mountain arc and they came out of it a few moments later before crossing the jungle in a straight line.

However, they had to leave the road a little more than half a kilometre later because a landslide had taken a chunk of the road and the convoy forked right across a small clearing just before the jungle leaved room for rolling meadows.

When they arrived at the top of a ridge, Hoskins saw Mena lower the window to take a picture of the bones of what was once a gigantic animal with a very long neck, long forelimbs and a skull characterized by a bony and tall arch anterior to the eyes.  
It was the skeleton of one of the animals that InGen had long thought were brachiosaurs (*).  
Hoskins had already seen pictures of live specimens, taken when Site B on Isla Sorna was active and Jurassic Park under construction.  
Mena asked her backseat neighbour to open the window and she held out her arm in front of him to take the picture of the remains of another brachiosaur, half-sunken in a waterhole bordered by the jungle in the west, down of the ridge.  
It was far from being the first time they passed there, but each time, some had a twinge in their hearts, imagining the brachiosaurs in their lifetime, imposing and magnificent.

The convoy continued southward to the edge of a cliff overlooking for a few kilometres a valley at the bottom of which flowed a river with murky waters, clasped on both sides by the jungle: The Cartago.  
They returned to the road there and drove along the cliffs for a while before turning south-west, towards the large plateau which occupied an entire part of the south of Isla Nublar.

The convoy soon reached the edge of a gorge at the bottom of which ran another river about twenty meters wide, the Rio Iris. A sturdy steel bridge, recently restored after being abandoned to the elements for years, spanned the gorge at its narrowest point about forty meters above the river.  
At its end on the southern bank, the bridge was barred by a tall portal crowned with barbed wire and flanked by watchtowers connected to each other by a footbridge.  
Armed sentries were watching for the arrival of the convoy and when it began to cross the bridge, one of the guards ordered the others to open the gate and it slid to the side.  
Even with the windows closed, the passengers heard a low growl, that of cascades upstream, and downstream, while looking east, some saw the blue of the ocean a few kilometres away.

One by one, the vehicles crossed the bridge and crossed the gate, taking a track leading them south.  
They passed between the plateau's escarpments and a rocky promontory where cranes were busy around the foundations of a building which, once its construction completed, would overlook the surrounding area like a citadel but for the moment the bushy vegetation prevented one to see what the valley to which the convoy was heading looked like.  
The convoy descended a gentle slope and once down, entered a village of khaki tents and portacabins lying at the foot of the promontory and the wooded slopes, on the fringes of the gigantic construction site in the valley whose sounds filled the air.  
Colossal would have been the first adjective crossing the mind of anyone seeing it for the first time.

A hundred hectares, almost the entire bottom of the valley and some of its slopes, had been largely deforested and cleared.  
Machines and men in sheer numbers were busy in what looked like a city under construction on the edge of a huge twenty-five-hectare pit that occupied the heart of the construction site and from which came dump trucks loaded with earth. Between and in springing up buildings or the excavations, hundreds of workers were working relentlessly, building, cutting, digging, welding, hammering or erecting scaffolding.  
In one place, yard waste but also dilapidated fences, obsolete signs and rusted vehicles, all of them being abandoned elements of Jurassic Park, were piling up. The old was giving way to the new.

At a junction, the convoy divided itself and only the truck carrying the tyrannosaur, the veterinary ambulance and the Pinzgauer continued their journey through the construction site while the others went to park in the heart of the camp, in front of a set of several portacabins contiguous to each other and surmounted by a satellite dish. Inside, a satellite phone was given to Hoskins.

The capture of the tyrannosaur was just one of the first steps along the path of the Indian tycoon's audacious undertaking but also one of the most crucial since this particular dinosaur was going to be one of the main attractions of the future tourist complex being built.  
While conversing with a cheerful Masrani on the other end of the line, Hoskins walked across the site towards a blockhouse-like structure beside which the containment truck had stopped.  
The blockhouse was attached to an area enclosed by high concrete walls, the quarantine paddock where the tyrannosaur would live until the completion of the construction of its main enclosure, located a little further and with which it communicated through a corridor.

As a crane lowered the dinosaur's body behind the concrete walls, Hoskins thought of the other dinosaurs still roaming free and he recalled of the pre-1993 incident list of Jurassic Park's animals.  
There were fifteen species on that list and he reviewed it again to determine which animals could still being an issue for the safety of the construction sites or the camp.

He first re-examined the herbivores case:  
Of the five species living in the park at the moment of the incident, brachiosaurs, _Triceratops_ and stegosaurs could have been potentially dangerous, but during an expedition in November 1994, mainly skeletons and carcasses were found.  
Isolated individuals had been encountered but they were so weak that there was no chance that the species would have survived for long and the scouts sent by Hoskins shortly after their landing in January 2002 reported that these three species of large herbivores had become extinct.  
The other two herbivore species, the _Gallimimus_ and the _Parasaurolophus_ , had relatively thrived because of their greater adaptability and the lack of competition from larger herbivores. It often happened that teams of workers or hunters encountered them, grazing peacefully in the valleys or the meadows.

Hoskins went on to the carnivores that made up the rest of the park's collection and thought again about their respective cases.  
He automatically removed four species: The tyrannosaur, which they had just captured; the velociraptors, which the mere mention of the name made InGen's employees shudder because of their reputation of fast, fearsome, cruel and terribly intelligent hunters, but thankfully, all of them were killed during the incident; the metriacanthosaurs, driven to extinction by the tyrannosaur, which considered them as undesirable rivals; and the pteranodons which, not having been able to leave their aviary, killed each other or starved to death.  
Among the carnivores, there were two small species: _Segisaurus_ and _Compsognathus_. While they were both insectivores and scavengers, with the first being no more dangerous to humans than foxes or badgers, the latter were particularly reckless and sneaky and it was better not to meet a troop while strolling alone in the middle of the jungle. By applying strict precautionary measures, the threat posed by compys, as they were nicknamed with some affection, should be considerably limited.  
There was also an old _Baryonyx_ _,_ bigger than the average, twelve meters long instead of the usual nine. The latter haunted a portion of the Cartago near the pteranodons' aviary, but the animal was timid by nature, hunting rather at night and avoiding men even though Hoskins suspected it must be very territorial and thus, refused to send men sailing up the river without an armed escort and ordered them to bypass his territory by the road. His case would be settled in time, once they will have a temporary pen ready.  
All that remained were the herrerasaurs _,_ the proceratosaurs _,_ and the dilophosaurs. It was those three species which could have troubled Hoskins on that day.  
They were at once small and agile enough to easily hide themselves in the jungle or to sow possible pursuers, and big enough to consider a healthy adult man as prey. But in the presence of vehicles and other noisy and odorous machines or too many humans, they were fearful and preferred to stay in the shadows and that was without counting on their more nocturnal or crepuscular behaviours, in the opposite of those of men who returned to the safety of their camp at night.  
Thus it was rare for Hoskins and his hunters to see them in the daylight, and when they did, there was only one individual or a handful at most, and frightened by the sounds of the engine and the loud discussions, they immediately retreated to the woods.  
With an adequate number of men, rifles and vehicles, he would be able to organize hunts throughout the jungle and secure their former hunting grounds by doing so. The task mustn't have to be taken lightly and strategies will have to be established but they were only animals, not guerrillas or some Resistance fighters...

The reconquest of Isla Nublar by InGen was no longer a fantasy, it was a reality and nothing seemed to stand in its way.

X

As the sun went down, the work stopped and the workers returned to the camp with a nonchalant air while conversing in Spanish with each other in high and playful voices: They were eager to join the big tent serving as a refectory and an improvised tavern for dinner and tantalizing scent came to them when they arrived nearby.  
When the dinner began at around seven, the nocturnal animals' concert had already started and the moon had appeared behind the clouds, lighting the construction site with its pale glow.

At the top of a ridge line in the east, beyond the Rio Iris, the _tapetum lucidum_ of a pair of eyes glowed in the midst of darkness.  
The eyes were looking towards the construction site and more particularly the camp, lit by many floodlights.  
The creature they belonged to was a wolf-sized biped dinosaur with a slender physique and arms ending in three clawed fingers.  
Its black-spotted body was of a dark brown colour while the head and the neck were pinkish but the more prominent feature of this species was the crest topping the snout, different in size and shape in each gender and in the individual spying on the territory that humans had taken over, it was only a small tip at the end of the snout : the animal was a female proceratosaur, a young adult having reached sexual maturity earlier in the year.  
She stood there for a few moments, glancing around the building site with a certain apprehension about the large machines that the men had brought from beyond the ocean aboard the steel leviathan that the cargo ship was in her eyes.

Then she turned away and started scampering north through the jungle, treading on the dead leaves, jumping over branches and running over slowly rotting lying trunks.

Lurking in a thicket, she had watched the men taking away the terrible tyrannosaur, ending its absolute reign on the island.  
During all these years after the departure of the men, it was it which had starved them and forced to live in the shadows and feed on lizards and small mammals, preventing them from satisfy their hunger. Many times the proceratosaurs had tried to steal pieces of food from the tyrannosaur, but at almost every attempt, they left behind one of them, usually those which were too greedy or not quick enough to escape the T. rex's wrath. They didn't know, but the men had just put an end to this and had freed the proceratosaurs from its yoke.  
Now, they could venture under the sun and hunt all the prey they want without the fear of becoming the meal of some bigger predator. There were some herrerasaurs and dilophosaurs that also lived in the island, but these potential rivals had their own territories, making inter-species conflicts rare and ephemeral. The former had settled in the desolate lands of the north, at the foot of the volcano, while the latter roamed the swampy plateau of the south and the jungle east of the Cartago river, the very same that the proceratosaur was crossing at speed, all senses in alert, her hearing looking out for the slightest suspicious hooting.  
Curiosity had led her to discreetly follow the men's convoy up to the bridge she had not dared to cross and in doing so, she had moved far away from her clan's lair, somewhere hidden further north.  
She had rested a few hours in an disused pipe before going hunting near the mouth of the Rio Iris, in the middle of the mangroves, searching for frogs or waterfowl, but there, the view of the sinister fin of a Bulldog shark sailing between the Mangrove trees had frightened her and the belly empty, she had moved away from water as the sun was setting.  
However, during her ascent to the heights, she had ran into a freshly landed rat and had swooped on him to swallow it voraciously.

When the proceratosaur heard the disturbing hoots of dilophosaurs north and east, she stopped and tilted her head to one side, listening carefully before heading west, towards the Cartago.

She quickly arrived there and swam across the river, undulating her body and frantically swinging her hind legs to cross the twenty or so meters separating the two banks as swiftly as possible, fearing that the long-snouted monster with the big claws that haunted it would swoop on her if it was nearby.  
When she reached the west bank, the proceratosaur straightened quickly and jumped to the thickets where she turned.  
Upstream, near the aviary whose arches overhung the surrounding jungle, she heard the surface of the water boiling and then two bright red dots appeared there before disappearing as suddenly as they appeared and without further delay, the proceratosaur rushed toward the line of cliffs in front of her.  
She found an old corniche road and began to follow it, climbing the cliffs in the direction of the aviary.

Reaching the top of the cliffs, the proceratosaur turned west and leaved the jungle, sprinting under the stars in the windswept Central Fields.  
She passed near the brachiosaurs's skeletons and continued west, towards a line of bushy trees and after having travelled a few hundred meters under the trees, she turned to the north.

After an hour and a half of running through woods and meadows since her viewpoint on the construction site, the proceratosaur reached a dried artificial body of water at the bottom of which trees had grown.  
On the other side of it, was the hideout of her clan, located among the ruins of a large concrete building topped with three thatched roofs with the largest being in the centre, sheltering a large entrance hall: Jurassic Park's Visitor Center.  
Since its abandonment, nature reclaimed her rights over this place as showed by the climbing plants that had stormed the walls and roofs, obstructing the large tinted windows that lined the entrance facade or concealing much of the fake fossils engraved around the door or the relief that adorned the top, representing a tyrannosaur _'_ s skeleton. The fountains on each side of the staircases leading to the door were buried under a layer of dead leaves, just like the steps themselves, which the proceratosaur climbed in small leaps.  
One of the panels of the door being ajar, she slipped into the space between it and the other panel and entered the silent hall.

Due to the fact that most of the windows and openings were obstructed, the rare light provided by the moon or the stars was unable to penetrate the hall and the darkness was such that a human being would have been unable to distinguish anything but a pair of bright eyes in the dark observing him or her from above, those of a sentry guarding the entrance to the lair and which, in a call, could summon its kin to repel any intruder ... or surround and tear into pieces anything that might look like a prey.  
The proceratosaur quietly walked around the skeleton debris and headed for the stairs leading up to the balcony and mezzanine overhanging the hall.  
The sentinel, a male with a scarlet head and whose crest stopped just before the eyes, straightened up and watched her climbing up the steps.  
When she arrived upstairs, he greeted her with a small grunt and the female proceeded, passing through the open door of the projection room where, lying on the dusty carpet between rows of torn seats, other proceratosaurs were sleeping.  
She did not pay attention to them and went to an opening at the rear of the room, next to a screen embedded in a wall of artificial rock, and beside which was lying a door leaf.  
Leaving the projection room, she faced a broken glass window overlooking the laboratory and its array of abandoned equipment, including a few computers and _Mitsubishi Movemaster RV-M2_ robotic arms, deployed over several incubators with moss-covered edges and of the eggs they once contained, all that remained was scattered pieces on the floor.  
However the laboratory was far from being devoid of life because it was there that the clan had made its nests.

More than twenty pairs of eyes shone in the dark, indicating the presence of a dozen couples, each having built its own nest with ferns or moss harvested outside or stuffing and sheets of paper found in the building.  
Passing through the breach, the proceratosaur entered the room and climbed down a metal staircase, heading towards the rear of the room, and those next to whom she passed made some kind of cooing to greet her.  
She was walking toward a male waiting alone beside one of the nests, his eyes half-closed, and when he saw her coming, he got up and came to sniff the female before rubbing his snout affectionately against hers and she returned the favour.  
A creak was heard from the nest and both parents leaned over it.  
It was their first brood and there were about twenty eggs in the nest, organized concentrically.  
The surface of one of the eggs had begun to crack and the being contained inside was struggling to split its shell.  
After making a small opening, the newborn proceratosaur took out one of his little clawed hands out of the egg and used it to remove other pieces of shell. When it managed to clear his head, he began to make a series of chirps to call its parents.  
As they watched him open its eyes, they noticed that they were as red as embers and not brown as theirs.  
Other cracking sounds informed them that the rest of the brood was about to hatch.

* * *

 **Annotations :**

(*)In the mid-2000s, it was discovered that InGen had in fact cloned specimens of _Giraffatitan_ , a genus closely related to _Brachiosaurus_ and living at the same time period but native from Tanzania and not from the American West.

* * *

 _ **A/N :**_

 _Aside from some clothing or haircut differences, the non-OC characters look like their film counterparts. There is only two exceptions but I will reveal which when the concerned characters will have their first scenes._

 _As you will notice during the read, there is a certain number of OC's in this story. The physical appearance for some of these new characters were inspired by real actors and I will indicate the names of the latter as author notes of the chapters in which they are introduced like in the following:_

 _ **Actor A** as Character A_

 _That isn't the case for all of the OC's however. If you end up having some suggestions for these ones, please feel free to tell me and the other readers about it in the reviews section._  
 _Nonetheless, I must specify one rule for this little game: No superstars._  
 _There is a thing I like about the Jurassic films it's that they didn't seek to cast superstars for most of their characters and the aforementioned OC's being of secondary or minor importance, it wouldn't be very realistic._


	3. A Long-expected Journey

Unbearable heat reigned over the tarmac of Juan Santamaría International Airport, hit by the sun's rays in the middle of that afternoon of December 2017, as a _Boeing 737_ was pulling out its landing gear.  
In Costa Rica, December marked the beginning of the dry season and fortunately for the tourists, the airport premises were relatively cool.

In the baggage reclaim hall, the carousel started.  
Suitcases and bags of various shapes and colours emerged from a conduit and passed in front of the passengers of the flight from Miami, massed in front of the carousel and waiting for their luggage to pass close at hand.  
A child's hand took the handle of a small navy blue suitcase and hauled in order to drop it at his feet.

The suitcase was the one of Gray Mitchell, twelve years old, thick and curly brown hair, lean and rather puny in appearance.  
Native from Wisconsin, he came to Costa Rica during the Christmas break to visit his aunt, who worked as the director of a recreational complex on an island off the Pacific coast.  
Further, his brother, Zach, a slender brown-haired young man of eighteen, grabbed the big black sports bag that was his luggage and hailed him:

"We can go bro!"

"We have to find the bus station."

"Don't worry, our boat sails at eleven thirty and a bus leaves from here every fifteen minutes. We have the whole evening in front of us."

They left the baggage reclaim hall and found themselves in the main hall of the airport.  
The arrivals walked along a barrier behind which were several people carrying signs with names inscribed on them, looking for the ones they were to meet, and then they dispersed in the hall.  
The two brothers, as well as several other tourists, followed a sign indicating the direction to take to go to the airport's bus station.

They passed glass doors to the outside and took a pedestrian crossing that led to an annex of the airport where there was a waiting room whose almost all of the seats were taken.  
They waited there a few minutes before a grey bus arrived and stopped in front of the room.

Employees of the airport, wearing a fluorescent vest over their T-Shirt, opened the cargo bay and began packing inside the suitcases that the tourists gave them.  
Once their luggage in the cargo hold, they headed for the steps and climbed in the vehicle.  
Zach paid for the driver and they sat side by side in the middle of the bus, Gray on the window side and Zach on the side of the aisle.

The bus started shortly after four o'clock, filled with passengers while the tourists who continued to flock had no choice but to go in the waiting room until the next departure.

The vehicle left the airport and took an access road that joined a high-speed road that passed by suburbs.  
In the east, volcanoes dominated the immense valley constituting the heart of the country and where was the capital, San José.

The bus entered the highway twenty minutes after their departure and headed west.  
The two Mitchells, as well as many foreigners, thought that Costa Rica was just misty tropical forests and idyllic beaches but their bus trip changed that vision.

Yellowing grass meadows extended from both sides of the highway and herons hunted there, searching for some sun gazing reptiles.  
The highway ran along, then passed over gorges at the bottom of which flowed streams under trees with thick foliage.  
In the bus, Gray was watching the landscape passing before his eyes and from time to time, he took a few pictures while Zach listened to music on his smartphone.

After about fifty minutes, they came out of the gorges and arrived in the coastal plain bordering the shores of the Pacific Ocean and crossed a rural area, dotted with innumerable fields and orchards as well as some villages with multi-coloured houses.  
At one point, they crossed a bridge spanning a river where crocodiles were lying motionless on the banks, their mouths open, while horses grazed in a pasture not far under the setting sun.

Shortly after, the waters of the Gulf of Nicoya, bathed in the last rays of the sun, were in sight and the fast road outlined a curve along a black sand beach in order to reach the other side of the bay where a complex had been built, consisting of several docks and a large building with a sleek design, the size of a shopping centre, and built with concrete, glass and steel.  
The road made them pass by mangroves bordering a lagoon and then they drove along cliffs which overhung the road.  
A sign on the side of the road indicated in Spanish and English the entrance of the ferry terminal for Isla Nublar, their destination.  
When they took this exit, the night was slowly falling and on the other side of the bay, the lights of a cargo port had lit up one by one.

The bus parked near the entrance of the building and passengers get off on the sidewalk where men in fluorescent vests unloaded the cargo hold of the bus by putting the luggage on the sidewalk that passengers were eager to get back before starting to move towards the entrance of the terminal, passing by a flag bearing the logo of Ogen Cruise Lines, a subsidiary of Masrani Global to which belonged the complex.  
Along the road, taxis dropped off passengers who, after paying their drivers, also converged towards the building.

After passing an entrance gate with glassed doors, they entered the hall and faced twenty or so counters that were accessed via a queue bounded by cords, but there was still no one within the queue or behind the counters.  
Gray moved closer to a display screen in the heart of the hall, in front of the queues entrance. The time was displayed as well as the arrival and departure times of the ferries. He stopped at the column that interested them :

 **Ship** : _Avalon_  
 **Boarding** : 8:00 pm - 10:30 pm  
 **Departure** : 11 : 30 pm  
 **Arrival** : 6.30 am

Gray looked at his watch and saw that it was only six o'clock.

To pass the time, they had their evening meal in one of the restaurants of the terminal before sitting among the many seats that could be found in the hall.  
Gray took his tablet to watch an episode or two of a television series while Zach was tapping away at his phone, earphones on his ears.  
Barely ten minutes before the beginning of the check-in, the queue already had a good hundred people and Gray signalled to his brother that they could go.

At the end of what was endless minutes for the younger of the two, they finally arrived in front of one of the counters and the ticket saleswoman, a plump Latin American of around fifty, told them to advance.  
Zach took out documents from his backpack, their bookings for the crossing, made by their parents a few months earlier.  
She asked the boys in English with a Hispanic accent to present their proof of identity and as soon as everything was in order, she printed their boarding passes.

"You will embark on the _Avalon_ at dock B, gate twenty-four," she pointed to them by showing a box on their ticket showing the number of their boarding gate.

They thanked her and she called the next passengers.

Zach and Gray came back into the hall and took the escalator leading upstairs and followed the direction marked by a sign titled "Security / Boarding Docks".

After passing the security, they were in sight of the waiting halls whose furniture was like the building itself, sleek and perfectly ordered.  
When they got there, they faced a large bay window stretching across the southern façade of the building, overlooking the docks where a ferry over two hundred and twenty meters long was moored, the flagship of Ogen's fleet: the _Avalon_.

Its imposing size and its many lights lit under the stars evoked Gray a spaceship.  
Excited despite the tiredness, he imagined being aboard an orbital station, ready to embark on the great ship that would take him to an exciting but far-off destination.  
Zach and Gray followed the signs to dock B and went to sit near the gate numbered twenty-four.  
Not far from the row of seats where they sat, a screen broadcast a national channel as well as the weather forecast. Zach looked at it briefly out of the corner of his eye: the sun or sunny spells were depicted all along the Pacific coast of Costa Rica for the day of Saturday, December 23rd. They were going to have a good weather the next day.

At around eight o'clock, two employees showed up at the counter and started boarding the passengers who took a metal gangway to get on the ship.

In the lobby, bellhops gave them the keys to their respective cabins, indicating the direction to take.  
The Mitchell took a lift and walked in never-ending corridors before finally arriving at the door of their cabin that the elder opened with the key given by the bellhop.  
On their left, a door opened into a small bathroom while facing them, were two single beds with blue sheets, separated by an aisle.  
A bedside table was between the two beds, under the porthole concealed by purple curtains.  
They washed and went to bed, exhausted because of the trip they had.

A little before midnight, Gray was awake for a few minutes and looking through the porthole, he realized that the _Avalon_ was leaving the harbour and its many lights.  
As it only became a bright spot in the distance, Gray went back to sleep while they sailed under the starry sky.


	4. Aboard the Avalon

The passengers were awakened at around five in the morning by the captain's voice on the ship's intercom, announcing them the arrival at destination at around half-past six.

While Gray was in the bathroom, Zach turned on his phone and noticed that he had received a text from their aunt shortly before midnight.  
He drew the curtains and saw that it was still dark.  
As soon as Gray came out of the bathroom, his brother rushed into it in order to get ready.  
After the two had packed their belongings, they went out to have breakfast.

Finding the price of breakfast in the ferry's restaurants ridiculously high, they fell back on the ship's convenience store where all sorts of items were sold, including food.  
They were not the only ones to make this decision since about twenty people were in front of the counter.  
Gray noticed that his brother had started a little conversation with a girl of his age who asked him questions about the length of their stay on the island or the fact that their parents didn't accompany them.  
They bought some sweet, went out on the promenade deck and sat down on a bench.  
The day had risen but the weather was cloudy and the ferry seemed to be heading straight for an enormous mass of mist to the west that covered the ocean.

"Claire sent me a message. She will not be able to come but she will send someone to pick us up at the entrance plaza," Zach announced.

"Why?"

"She told me about a press conference and a big contract to sign. She may be busy for the whole day."

"Oh," Gray said, visibly disappointed by the news.

When he had finished eating, he added:

"I'm going for a walk on the deck. See you in the cabin in ten minutes."

"Ok," his brother replied absently, his eyes fixed on his cell phone. "I'll wait for you but with this pea soup, you'll see zilch."

Gray walked along the deck towards the bow, where some tourists had fun recreating the famous scene from the _Titanic_ film while their friends took pictures of them.

A seagull landed on the railing of the deck, a crab trapped in its beak.  
Gray looked at the seagull and began to approach the bird while trying not to make sudden movements in order to not scare the animal.  
It flew away anyway and the boy lost sight of it in the fog.

At the bow, a dozen passengers had gathered to starboard and discussed with each other while pointing to something hidden in the mist.

Approaching the group, Gray heard the conversation in more detail:

"Fred claims to have seen something," said one of the tourists, speaking with a strong British accent.

"There, look!" Another added, pointing to the outlines of a tall dark form among the mist.

Once they were closer, Gray realized that the shape was a rocky piton as high as a twelve-storey building, rising above the surface of the water like a titanic and roughly cut pillar, giving it an intimidating look: One of the Solitary Islets. Nublar was near.  
Gray noticed that while he was looking at the peak, more passengers had gathered at the end of the bow, scanning the horizon enshrouded by mist.  
When he reached the group, Gray saw the island rise abruptly from the ocean as the _Avalon_ was ripping through the mist.

On maps and satellite photographs, Isla Nublar has the shape of an inverted tear, widened in the north and narrow in the south.  
It is nearly twenty-six kilometres long and twenty at its widest point, and is the result of more than fifteen million years of volcanic activity, an activity whose spectacular results were able to observed by the _Avalon_ 's passengers during their approach.

The coast was very craggy and the top of the cliffs peaked just over two hundred meters above the ocean, and so were shrouded in the mist, giving the island a mysterious look.

" _Dear passengers, here we are, in sight of the walls of Isla Nublar. I inform you that we will soon dock. As planned, landing will begin at seven o'clock. Have a pleasant stay with my blessing and I wish you good end of the year festivities,_ " the captain declared in the loudspeaker.

While looking at the foot of the escarpments, the passengers noticed the presence of numerous ragged rocks along the shore and on which cormorants were perched.  
The farthest rocks from the shore were almost acting like a natural dyke and suffered the onslaught of the waves, which by crashing themselves against them, raised great sprays of water and producing a disturbing roar.  
The place was not favourable to berthing boats, only skiffs or rowing boats could have reached the few beaches that passengers see and yet, they were usually rocky or located at the foot of steep faces of volcanic rock. From there, no path leading inland was visible and to reach one of the few gorges going further inland, it would have been necessary to go along the beach waterfront and walk on the slippery and sharp rocks.  
To the south, Gray saw the entrance to a valley marked by the presence of an islet larger and more massive than the piton he had seen just earlier. Behind, a waterfall emptied itself into the ocean.

As the _Avalon_ was about to turn off in order to go alongside the coast, he turned and felt that the mass of tourists watching the island from the bow had grown to occupy its entirety.

The ferry had veer to the northeast, going alongside the hills that were losing size in that direction until they became mounds.  
At the level of a rocky overhang, a liner was moored but the _Avalon_ 's passengers saw neither dock nor building serving as a reception point for the liner's passengers.  
About a kilometre and a half behind, the yellowish light of a lighthouse shone faintly through the mist.  
Suddenly, the powerful sound of a foghorn made the passengers on the deck jump: The _Avalon_ announced its arrival at the dock.  
Screaming seagulls passed over the ferry and bypassing the stern of the liner at a respectable distance, the tourists realized that the liner had in fact concealed the view of the docks.

There were three of them, built strongly enough to resist the onslaught of the elements, and starting from the base of the rocky overhang.  
They were also of unequal size: the one where the liners docked was the longest of all, while the one at the centre dedicated to the high-speed catamarans that made up the bulk of Ogen Cruise Lines fleet was the shortest and finally, the dock for great ferries like the _Avalon_ was of an intermediate size.  
Basalt towers topped by pointed wooden roofs had been built at regular intervals on these last two docks and the towers of a same dock were interconnected by bridges.  
Those met at the level of a covered passage that climbed the overhang to the structure perched at its summit, the Nublar terminal.  
Its pentagonal configuration, its large concrete walls and flat roof would have evoked a defensive structure if one had not observed many windows and patio doors as well as terraces overlooking the docks equipped with tables with umbrella, and the fact that climbing plants partially covered the structure helped to make it less austere. At the end of the docks, sliding metal doors indicated the presence of depots or other technical facilities built inside the rock, under the terminal.

As the _Avalon_ moored at the dock dedicated to it, the passengers returned to their cabins in order to pick up their belongings before converging to the exit doors.


	5. Welcome

At seven o'clock, the doors were opened and they took the gangways deployed between the ship and the towers to join the covered bridge that connected the towers, and headed to the covered passage at the start of the docks.  
A moving walkway allowed them to join the terminal and when they reached its end, they passed in front of a closed double glass door leading to the waiting halls two floors above.  
Instead, the arrivals took a corridor on the right which led them to a large, rectangular, windowless hall with an austere furnishing and a series of security checkpoints. When the flow of tourists entered the queue bounded by cords that separated it from the checkpoints, the hall quickly became noisy.  
Under the watchful eye of the security staff on guard duty there, they crossed the security checkpoints and advanced towards the stairs or the elevator behind, going to the ticket office.

Located in the heart of the building, the ticket office was a hall much more welcoming than the previous one. Elliptical in shape and flanked by two densely vegetated patios, there were a dozen of ticket booth in front of which tourists queued up.  
Zach and Gray reached one of the ticket booth after a good fifteen minutes of waiting and presented their e-tickets, displayed on the screen of their mobile phones.  
The ticket salesman passed his scanner on the two barcodes and everything being in order, he gave each a map of the island and a white plastic wristband, advising the boys to always keep them on them during their stay on the island.  
They thanked him and get around the booth to head towards a vault under which they passed to enter the lobby of the terminal, large and light.

Wide stone staircases started from each end of the hall to led to the floor where the waiting halls were located, overlooking the terraces and the docks.  
At the level of the lobby, there was also a restaurant, a souvenir shop, counters where one could order tickets to return to the mainland, and a fountain in the centre.

A significant part of the arrivals followed a sign with "Baggage drop-off" written on it, in order to go give their most cumbersome luggage at another series of counters where receptionists asked them their names and the ones of their accommodation so that they could send the luggage there and the tourists could find those in their room after their first day of activities on the island.  
But since Zach and Gray were going to be picked up at the plaza just beyond the park's entrance gate, they didn't use that service and continued, following another sign on which a underground train was drawn.

When they arrived at the terminal's metro station, they noticed that the train was still waiting and the two brothers rushed in with their luggage but they could not find seats because the carriage was fully packed.  
The doors slid and a long beep indicated to the passengers that the vehicle was starting.  
The train left the platform, exiting the building, but the passengers had barely the time to notice that the morning sun was chasing the clouds that they were surrounded by vegetation on each side of the rail.  
Then, the vegetation gave way to the rock walls of a cave and they were plunged into darkness for a short time, until the lights were automatically switched on.

After a minute, while they were still in the cave, the train stopped along the arrival platform and a recorded voice asked all the passengers to get off.  
When they leaved the carriages, the arrivals noticed that they were only in semi and not complete darkness thanks to a large arch nearby that let in natural light from the outside.  
The arrivals passed under the arch and began to follow a winding path among the trees in the bottom of a narrow pass where the air was moist because of the stream flowing in it.

As they were following it, they found that the pass had something quite idyllic with the rays of the sun breaking through the foliage to reach the path, or the sounds produced by various animals populating the jungles of the island: birds, frogs and even monkeys, recently reintroduced. They saw some, spider-monkeys, grooming each other on a branch fixed on the rock walls.

At the end of a turn two hundred meters from the exit of the cave, they arrived on a paved plaza extending from one wall to the other, embellished with palm trees, benches, small fountains and a few small structures with thatched roofs, joined on the walls and among which were toilets and an information booth.  
But the most notable thing about this plaza is that it was laid out just in front of a fifteen-meter high black basalt wall that blocked their way out of the pass.

Guarding the gate in the centre of the wall, there were two five-meter high sculptures representing tyrannosaur heads.  
Despite the fact that they could have been considered terrifying with their teeth partially uncovered, something powerful, majestic even, emanated from them however and the effect they had on the tourists was comparable to those produced by some statues of dragons placed in the vicinity or inside castles or palaces in Europe and the Far East.

The gate itself was nine meters high and eight wide. Its panels were massive and made of a black wood and approaching, both Mitchell saw that friezes on which were depicted all kinds of prehistoric animals, mostly dinosaurs, had been carved on them.  
Overhanging the tyrannosaurs heads, flames were dancing and crackling on recesses in the wall.  
Above the gate, large letters were carved in the stone:

 **JURASSIC** **  
** **WORLD**

Jurassic World, such was the name of this leisure complex built on this island lost off the coast of Costa Rica.  
Despite its geographical remoteness, it was one of the most renowned theme parks in the world because of the unique nature of its main attractions. More than three and a half million visitors went there each year, about nearly twenty thousand visitors per weekend.  
And it was there, right behind that impenetrable wall.

Confronted to this mysterious cyclopean construction, many tourists had the impression of being the heroes of an adventure film about to explore the ruins of a long forgotten civilization, in a lost world isolated since thousands of year.

As they continued to arrive from the path, the gate was still closed and those who arrived first were waiting as patiently as they could by chatting with each other.  
Looking at the floor, Gray saw that some of the slabs were painted in black and he thought that if he had been able to gain height, he would probably have seen a mosaic but being surrounded on all sides by other tourists whose ranks were continuously growing, he could not have a clue about the shape of the mosaic.

Once the last arrivals were in the plaza and it was eight-thirty, discussions stopped when a music began to fill the air. They heard a mix of exotic and orchestral instruments.

The voice of a middle-aged woman, the one of a famous actress known to have played in several famous sci-fi films, spoke:

"Dear visitors, you are now entering the lost world of the prehistoric past, a world of mighty creatures long gone from the face of the earth, which you have the privilege to see here, on Isla Nublar."

As she spoke, the music grew in intensity and choirs began to sing in an unknown language.

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Jurassic World!" The voice wished solemnly.

A sound of hinges was heard and the big panels began to open at the same time while the choirs intoned a chorus.  
It was like if the combination of the welcome speech and the choirs was in fact a ritual aiming to open it.  
As the magic of the park was beginning to have an effect on them, some tourists couldn't help to have exclamations of wonder.

An employee in pink polo and beige trousers passed the half-open gate and stepped forward, stopping between the two sculptures.  
When the panels were parallel under the stone vault, they stopped and the pink polo employee stepped away to let the horde of excited visitors enter the park after their long journey.

Passing through the gate, the arrivals came to another plaza, more circular in shape, and which quickly became packed.  
Behind arcades on each side of the gate, other employees in pink polo were opening a cafeteria and a souvenir shop.  
In the centre of the plaza, a four meters high statue stood on a pedestal in the middle of a flowerbed.

It represented an old man with a little stoutness, a thin beard, proud face and his right hand resting on the golden knob of a cane.  
As he approached, Gray saw that the pommel was a polished piece of amber in which a mosquito was trapped.  
On a plaque fixed on the pedestal, he read:

 **John Parker Hammond**

 **Born in 1928 in Edinburgh** **  
** **Died in 1997 in New York**

 ** _Creation is an act of sheer will._**

Behind the statue, there was a lookout overlooking the interior of the island and whose stone guardrail was decorated with wrought iron orbs containing fire.  
To the left and to the right of the lookout, some of the arrivals took wide stairs to reach a monorail station built under the plaza.

Near the top of the right stairs, Zach saw a woman scanning the arrivals behind her sunglasses, as if she was looking for someone among them.

In her thirties, she was thin and her long, loose, jet-black hair fell back on her shoulders.  
She was dressed in a white blouse, black leggings and was wearing court shoes.  
It was as he lowered his eyes that Zach noticed that she was holding a slate on which their names were written with a black felt pen.

When she saw Zach, she looked briefly at her cell phone and she waved to him.

"Gray? I think it's for us," he informed his brother.

Zach walked towards the stranger and she introduced herself:

"Hello. I am Miss Young, your aunt's assistant. She charged me to bring you to her."

She hold out her hand and he shook it.

"Zach, nice to meet you," he introduced himself, giving her a charming little smile.

"Where is your brother?"

Zach looked on the sides and behind him.  
Gray had not followed him and his attention had turned to the group of tourists gathered at the lookout.

"Gray!" Zach shouted. "Come and say hello to the lady. The view can wait a little longer."

"I cannot wait anymore!" His brother said.

Gray suddenly rushed towards the lookout, making his way through the other visitors without apologizing, and when he reached it, he put his hands on the guardrail and looked at an extraordinary view.

At the entrance of a paradisiacal valley surrounded to the west by the steep edges of a plateau and to the east by the hills seen from the Avalon, the waters of a lagoon reflected the pure azure of the luminous sky.  
Of an enormous size for an artificial lagoon, it was more than twenty hectares and was in fact divided into several lagoons of various size and depth, separated from each other by what resembled reef barriers from afar. But for practical reasons, the ensemble of lagoons was however called the Lagoon.  
On the southern shore, the closest to the lookout, about thirty bungalows on stilts were lined up over the water and looking northward, towards Mount Sibo, the highest mountain of Isla Nublar, peaking at an altitude of one thousand five hundred and seventy-five meters and located twelve and a half kilometres from the Lagoon as the crow flies, rising behind the mountains of the Embrace, beyond the lush expanses of the island.  
Gray began to envy the tenants of the bungalows who, at sunset, must had a magnificent view, including the Sibo in the background as well as, on the northern side of the Lagoon, an ensemble of buildings with sand-coloured walls, thatched or ochre-tiled roofs and whose architecture evoked a mix of Mayan and Spanish Colonial Revival styles: It was a part of Burroughs, the real beating heart of Jurassic World.

Named after famous novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan and John Carter, Burroughs was organized around the Lagoon and included the most noticeable buildings of Jurassic World including most hotels, the commercial area, as well as the monolithic and volcano-shaped Discovery Centre, located at the end of an avenue that starts from the promenade that overhung the lagoon on its northern edge.  
At each of its extremities, the promenade was delimited by an archway under which visitors came and went : While the one in the west was located not far from an amphitheatre built around a small bay in the Lagoon and similar in its conception to those which can be found in some marine animals parks and where visitors could attend to orcas shows, the eastern one had been built between the edge of the Lagoon and the base of a hill thirty meters, located in the continuity of the hills running alongside the coastline, and which was not without reminding the depictions of Palatine Hill at the peak of the Roman Empire.

The top of that hill was occupied by a huge building partially enclosing some large courtyard or garden, ten stories high, with countless balconies and whose roof covered by vegetation was decorated at regular intervals with large statues representing various large reptiles of the Mesozoic: the Grand Nublarian Hotel.  
Dug within the hill, Gray noticed the presence of a tunnel inside which a monorail entered and he deduced that there likely was a station under the hotel.  
Between the Grand Nublarian hill, the Discovery Center and the promenade, there was a shallow water body, crossed by a stone bridge that connected the plaza in front of the Discovery Centre to large bleachers on the opposite bank and facing the centre.  
Gray's vision then extended beyond Burroughs into the dense, green jungle that covered most of the island.

To the east, there were two mountains with jagged ridges and pointed tops that were often shrouded by mist, hence the name of Misty Mounts that had been given to them, and the highest of these two mountains, the farthest, easily peaked at a little more than a thousand meters of altitude; to the north, upstream from the longest river on the island, the Cartago, he saw the dome formed by one of the park's large aviaries, rising high above the trees and the gorge it was blocking.

He couldn't believe it but he was there, at Jurassic World or, as many called it, the eighth wonder of the world.


	6. Burroughs

When his contemplation was over, Gray went to join Zach, who was waiting for him with Miss Young.

She introduced herself to the youngest and then said in her Irish accent:

"Come. You must meet your aunt at quarter past nine in the Discovery Centre's rotunda. I will take you there but let's first drop your luggage at her place."

They went down the stairs in front of which she stood and she took them to an employee parking lot. There, they got into a golf cart and she drove up to their aunt's residence, an elegant little hacienda with white walls and a roof of ochre tiles.

It being located at the top of the ridge line between Burroughs and the coastline, the entrance on the eastern side overlooked the ocean while the west-facing terrace overlooked the city and a part of the park.  
There, Zach and Gray dropped their luggage in their rooms and rested for about ten minutes, slouched on the living room's couch, before heading to the Discovery Centre.

They climbed aboard Young's cart and followed a road that winded between several other houses similar to their aunt's one, albeit smaller in size, and some small apartment blocks that looked like university accommodations and where a portion of the employees lived. As they drove down towards the Lagoon, Zach saw similar buildings on the slopes at the foot of the plateau's edge, on the opposite side of the valley.

The cart stopped in a car park at the foot of the hill on which was the Grand Nublarian, and after taking a short path blocked by a gate preventing tourists from entering the employee-only areas, the trio ended up on a long path lined with palm trees and connecting the hotels south of the Lagoon to the Promenade.

They joined the stream of visitors going towards the Promenade and passed between the two life-sized statues of _Triceratops_ that flanked the path just in front of the stone archway at the entrance of the Promenade.  
After the archway, three different paths met at a crossroads.  
Counter-clockwise, there was : A set of two covered escalators climbing the hill to its summit and the entrance of the Grand Nublarian ; a street bypassing the hill, sloping gently down to a quay skirting the pond stretching between the hill and the Discovery Centre; and finally, on the left, the Promenade itself.  
Young and the two boys continued in that direction, passing in front of the Visitors Relations Office, a building serving mainly as an information point in addition to contain lockers, the lost and found office, and a strollers and wheelchairs rental service.

The Promenade skirted the Lagoon's edge while overhanging the surface of the water from half a dozen of meters and a low mall, adorned with the same kind of orbs that could be found on the overlook's wall, acted as a railing and even in the case where someone careless fell off, a grating fixed obliquely to the wall would have pretend him or she from falling in the water.  
Facing the opposite bank of the Lagoon, where the water park and some hotels were located, benches had been placed under the shade of the palm trees while an arcade contiguous to the Promenade's buildings skirted the opposite side of the road.

These buildings were three stories high at most but were quite remarkable nonetheless since they were designed to immerse visitors in a fantasy world.  
The park's creators had hired production designers that had experience on high-budget historical or fantasy films in order to create a visual identity for the park that contrasted with the everyday life of the visitors or those of other theme parks.  
Although the designers have been mostly inspired by the art and architecture of several Mesoamerican civilizations, especially the Mayans and the Olmecs, as well as the Spanish Colonial Revival style, some elements of the park were of Polynesian or Romanesque influences.  
Elements reminiscent of modern civilization, for their part, were generally concealed by the scenery, or integrated into it. This was the case, for example, of the logos of the numerous restaurants and shops belonging to world-famous chains, painted on the walls or on signs fixed to the arcades.

Nearly two hundred and fifty meters after the crossroads, the two Mitchell and their aunt's assistant arrived in sight of the _Emporium_ , a souvenir shop located at the southern end of Richard Owen Avenue and offering a wide variety of souvenirs such as cuddly toys, pins, figurines or hats shaped like dinosaur heads.  
When they turned to enter the Avenue, they passed by a fountain with a high basin flanked by four elegantly carved _Parasaurolophus_ heads, each looking in a different direction with one of them facing the entrance of the Discovery Centre, two hundred meters away and guarded by two great statues.

Richard Owen Avenue consisted of four blocks separated by a paved street one hundred meters long and ten meters wide.  
On both sides of the road and just like at the Promenade, arcades ran along the buildings and allowed people to move between buildings while being sheltered from the weather, be it the heavy rains due to the tropical climate or the strong sunshine of some sweltering days, in addition to provide a passage when the street was full of people during the fireworks or parades that took place on certain special occasions.  
The apparent freshness that they seemed to provide was enough to attract the trio but the tourists were already too many and they had to stay on the avenue where it was easier to move along despite the fact that the visitors were already numerous there a little more than half an hour after the opening of the attractions.  
Although the shops had just opened and that there was only some of the dining facilities being opened, as these were offering a breakfast service, the Avenue would not have been devoid of activity without the visitors that flocked in whole groups because on the sidewalks or behind some arcades, stallholders had already taken place and were welcoming customers.

As they walked up the avenue, Zach scanned the items sold: Jewellery, objects made with pieces of amber, wooden statuettes, fruits and even insects and other arthropods, grilled and seasoned according to the customers' wishes.  
Coming from a shop behind the arcade on their right, he heard hammer blows on an anvil, those of a blacksmith striking the iron he used to make the hand-crafted items he sold.  
In addition to the stalls, there were also benches and ornamental plants on the sidewalks, as well as braziers and flags promoting the park's various attractions.

Gray's excitement grew and his imagination ignited just by looking at them. Amongst the scenes depicted on the flags, he saw an off-road truck passing in the middle of a herd of duck-billed dinosaurs, a flock of multi-coloured pterosaurs flying against a scenery of waterfalls and high rock walls, visitors on platforms giving branches to sauropods, or a seabed where long-necked marine reptiles as well as some kind of gigantic nurse shark and other strange fish lived.  
The flags had been put there in order to create a sense of anticipation among the visitors walking for the first time in the Avenue to join the different areas of the park from the circular plaza located between the Avenue and the Centre.

"Look out! Move aside please, Gray," Miss Young suddenly warned.

Farther ahead on the avenue, the visitors stepped aside as if to let pass a vehicle of which he saw the open roof.  
The crowd and the distance prevented him from seeing it properly, but Gray saw that it was one of those old horse-drawn trams that were popular in the large cities of the West until the beginning of the twentieth century.  
Then, when the last tourists between him and the vehicle moved aside, Gray saw that the vehicle was not drawn by horses but by a different kind of animals.

There were two of them and their skin was not covered with hairs but scales and they were walking on their hind legs, twice as long as the front ones. Their skin was dirty yellow spotted with light green, except on the extremities of their limbs which were black.  
These animals also had an elongated, narrow skull with a toothless beak covered with keratin.

They were dinosaurs, the first that Zach and Gray saw during their stay, excluding the modern seabirds encountered on the coast or the passerines fluttering amongst the trees bordering the garden of their aunt's house.  
As a prehistoric animal enthusiast, Gray took only a very short time to recognize the species: They were mantellisaurs, a contemporary and related species of the famous _Iguanodon_ but unlike it, _Mantellisaurus_ was of a more fragile constitution and also smaller, measuring six and a half meters long and two meters high at the top of the back, and weighing just under seven hundred kilograms, the same weight as a medium-sized draft horse.  
At least that was what the fossil record indicated, but the individuals that Gray had in front of his eyes did not exceed the height of a Percheron and were more robust than the individuals portrayed in reconstitutions.

Led by the coach driver, the two mantellisaurs passed in front of the trio while drawing their tram on rails embedded in the avenue.  
On board, there were thirty amazed passengers, sitting on benches behind the coach driver or on the upper deck of the vehicle.  
The Mitchells were surprised by the docility with which the mantellisaurs were performing their task and even if the two dinosaurs had stopped and the coach drive would have allowed the two to touch them, Zach and even Gray would have hesitated to do so, intimidated that they were by the size of these draft animals but mainly because they were dinosaurs, creatures whose domestication had only crossed the minds of very few people since InGen had recreated these animals due to the fact that most of them were considered as wild animals just like the elephant, the tiger or the crocodile.  
For them, it was as like if one had the idea of hitching zebras to a coach and then Gray thought back to the domestication and taming of certain species in the course of human history. The wolf that gave the breeds of dog that we know, the wild boar from which descended the domestic pig, the elephant for forestry or war, the dromedary and the camel to transport goods across deserts, birds of prey for falconry or even the cheetah, once used for hunting by Indian maharajas.  
This helped him to put things in perspective but the realization of the idea of tamed dinosaurs drawing trams may surprise many, the managers of Jurassic World being naturally the first to attempt this experiment that many considered as eccentric.

Still under the effect of this encounter, Zach and Gray proceeded, following Young, and as they went up the Avenue towards the Centre, the great statues guarding its door rose slowly like towers.  
On large pedestals stood two life-sized stone giraffatitans, great figures imbued with might and majesty, severely contemplating the Avenue with their veiled eyes.

They reached the Obelisk Square at the foot of the artificial volcano housing the Centre. Monolithic and high, it measured seventy meters from the base to the top of the crater and from above, the false mountain was shaped like a star with four ridges radiating as spurs from the crater.  
Acting as a real symbol of the park in a similar manner to the iconic princess castles of Disneyland parks and being taller and more massive than these, this construction was towering over the city.

The plaza itself was named after the obelisk erected at its centre, surrounded by a green lawn, and on which was engraved the geological time scale. The obelisk and the surrounding lawn were also acting as central point of a roundabout as not only Richard Owen Avenue but also four paths started from the plaza, two eastbound and two westbound: the south-eastern one led to the bleachers on the other side of the pond, the north-eastern one to the Zoo, the north-western one to the Tyrannosaur Kingdom, and the southwestern one to the Western Residential District.  
The latter was blocked most of time by a wooden gate that opened only to let some vehicles pass while the employees used a passage hidden from the visitors' sight to move between this district and the park.  
There were also similar gates, all adorned with tribal-style carvings, on the northern paths but they were left wide open during the park's opening hours.

The rails of the tram circled the lawn and the Mitchells saw one the vehicles stopped by the sidewalk in front of the steps going up to the Centre's door.  
While visitors were getting on the tram, the mantellisaurs were waiting patiently, resting on all fours, and as Young and the boys were quickly crossing the plaza, the coach driver let the animals know they could leave and they stood on their hinds legs, then started to waddle, going around the lawn before entering the Avenue.  
On the rim of the plaza, there were some gentle single-jet fountains, whether it be in front of densely planted tropical vegetation in the west and the north-east, or contiguous to the platform on which were located the pedestals of the statues as well as the door, high and made of a skilfully sculpted bronze.

As they approached the wide staircase leading to the top of the platform, the Mitchell saw that descending from it to the left and the right, two ramps for wheelchairs and strollers ran along the seemingly rocky walls.  
Their base were located not far from double glazed doors opening on the interior of the building : In the east, it was the entrance of the IMAX cinema, combining the Omnimax process and the 3D double projection, equipped with three hundred and fifty seats and a hemispherical screen of one thousand square meters. In the west, it was the one of the Centre's large souvenir shop, two stories high.  
Although there was a long bay window at the level of the shop and a series of overlying galleries looking out on the outside behind the giraffatitans, openings were rarer on the rest of the building and generally were only windows with no panes, especially on the upper floors.  
Above the colossi of stone and stretching from one ridge to the other, there was a silent line of pterosaurs statues, perched there like gargoyles.

A respectful fear took Gray: looking upward, he felt very small as they climbed the steps, under the permanent shadow of the stone giants.


	7. The Discovery Centre

The bronze door being open, they entered the cool and sonorous shadows of the Centre and passed into the entrance hall, spacious and with walls adorned with bas-reliefs.  
It communicated with three other rooms: In the west with the upper level of the souvenir shop, in the east with the queue of the IMAX cinema and opposite the entrance, it opened on a large circular room with a polished floor: The Rotunda.  
On either side of the passage leading to the latter, visitors were leaning on two long counters in front of deep and furnished alcoves, asking the employees stationed there various information or renting them audio guides.  
Gray's eyes gazed at the rotunda.

Of a diameter of forty meters and a height of thirty-five meters at the top of the dome covering the hall, its dimensions were impressive and its appearance evoked more a place of worship or a throne room than the main hall of a science museum, as if the building was originally a temple carved inside the volcano.  
The rotunda itself was encircled and overhung by two meters by an eight-meter-high gallery that could be accessed through steps to the west and the east. Two others galleries of a height twice as small sat atop of the latter and between the last and the base of the dome, stood a high circular wall pierced by light wells.  
Starting from the rim of the rotunda and supporting the ceiling of each of the galleries, large and powerful pillars adorned with high reliefs rose to large carved capitals depicting various animals and plants. The balustrades acting as guardrails in each of the galleries also featured this type of sculpture and on those of the second and third galleries, they were adorned at regular intervals with busts of a variety of prehistoric animals, all looking down the visitors in the rotunda.  
Between and behind the pillars at the level of the first gallery, one could discern murals depicting major milestone in the history of life on Earth, from the Cambrian explosion that took place more than five hundred and thirty million years ago, up to the development of the first human civilizations at the beginning of the Holocene (*). There were also four arches leading to the other halls of the Centre: one to the northwest, one to the northeast, one to the southeast, and one to the southwest.  
High above their heads, Zach and Gray saw a vertical well in the middle of the vast vault, opening on a circle of blue sky.

A giant 1:2000 model of the island, about thirteen meters long and ten wide at its widest point, larger than a squash court, stood in the centre of the room like a giant altar.  
Each mountain, hill, gorge, valley and river had been faithfully reproduced and the most important constructions were also featured.  
Thus, visitors could use the model in order to organize their visit and at the exact spot corresponding to the Solitary Islets, they could climb on a small platform and use its console to obtain information on several dozen places across the island and locate them on the model by pressing a switch that lit a coloured diode corresponding to the desired location.

At the end of the hall, on a platform preceded by numerous steps, carved in the wall, was a high relief representing a multitude of prehistoric animals intertwined in one another and frozen in a scene which, from the point of view of the visitors, evoked sometimes a tale of the creation of the world, sometimes an apocalypse. The high relief was so voluminous that it occupied a whole section of wall, rising to the level of the second floor's balustrade, and interrupted the three galleries which thus described an incomplete circle.  
Above the sculpture, a large circular window gave a glimpse of the building's exterior, and on clear days, those who were on the upper galleries could see Mount Sibo in the distance if they positioned themselves at the right spot.  
Both Zach and Gray scanned the cavernous room in respectful silence, impressed by the achievements of Jurassic World's architects.

When they visited Burroughs for the first time, some journalists claimed that Simon Masrani, the man behind the Jurassic World project and CEO of Masrani Global, had built a real city to the glory of those once-extinct saurian that dinosaurs were.  
Many considered the park to be the world capital of these animals, it was even nicknamed the Vatican of Palaeontology, and famous and reputed palaeontologists such as Paul Sereno, Robert Bakker, Jack Horner, Xu Xing and Philippe Taquet had already held conferences and some had even worked for the park as consultants.

While waiting for their aunt, Miss Young allowed them to wander in the Rotunda. While Zach was interested in the model, Gray opened the map of the museum he had grabbed at the entrance. He read the names of the different halls and exhibitions:

 **Second floor:**  
\- Jurassic Park Memorial  
\- The Lost World of the Five Deaths  
\- Mankind and dinosaurs  
\- History of Jurassic World  
\- Jeffery Hudson conference room

 **First floor:**  
\- Natural History of Isla Nublar and the Archipelago of the Five Dead  
\- Tun-Si: From deportees to keepers of legends  
\- Temporary Exhibitions Hall (Until April 5, 2018: _Prehistory and Pop Culture_ )

 **Ground floor:**  
\- Rotunda

 _Norman Atherton Laboratories_  
\- From Mendel to Watson and Crick: The beginnings of genetics  
\- Deextinction: Why?  
\- Once upon a time, a man named John Hammond...  
\- Extraction  
\- Sequencing  
\- Insemination  
\- Incubation  
\- Hatchery  
\- Nursery

\- Souvenir shop

\- History of palaeontology  
\- The beginnings of the Earth  
\- Geological curiosities  
\- Palaeozoic  
\- Mesozoic  
\- Cenozoic

\- Cafeteria

 **Basement:**  
\- Childrens' area  
\- Hall of holograms  
\- _KT Apocalypse!_ (Simulator)  
\- IMAX Dome  
\- Sanjay Masrani congress room

Behind Gray, coming from the north-western arch, three women came, walking abreast while conversing.

"Janet, we must find a snappy title for the press release," one of them declared.

"I thought about: _In 2018, get ready to be afraid_...," the one named Janet proposed.

"No, too common," the first said.

Half-listening those without paying much attention to their conversation until then, Gray's interest suddenly increased because they had mentioned a press release linked to the following year.  
The park had not yet revealed the nature of the 2018 novelty and as many, Gray was keen to know it and had even discussed about it on some forums. The smallest piece of information was valuable, and as he listened carefully, he looked over his shoulder towards the high relief in front of which the three women he presumed to be employees of the park had stopped.  
His assumption was confirmed when he saw that they were elegantly dressed and wearing heels, not to mention the fact that two of them had their badge in evidence.

There was a mixed-race woman with a bobbed hairstyle, nearly fifty, clad entirely in black; a blonde with a pointed nose, of about forty years and wearing a blouse with floral motifs; and finally, between the two, a red-haired woman, around thirty-five years old, with a slender, elegant figure, wearing a flawless white suit and whose slightly wavy hair had been tied in a bun.  
She was both the youngest and the tallest of the three, although she was only of medium stature but her high heels helped her to look taller. She was a head taller than the two other woman and given the gestures and manners she adopted as she was talking to them, speaking with a deep voice full of self-assurance and natural authority, Gray thought she had to be their boss.

"Bigger, louder, more teeth," the blonde said.

"And why not: _Fear the Emperor of Isla Nublar_ ," the eldest suggested.

"Emperor? As if to emphasize that it is superior to King T. rex?" Asked the redhead. "But it's well thought out, Regina! This is sexy! This will sell!"

The one called Regina took out her cell phone to read a message she had just received.

"Henry has arrived," she said. "He will join us in front of the room."

The redhead sighed. The arrival of this Henry visibly annoyed her.

"Since the position of park director flew over his head and came to me, he has not stopped throwing pseudo-humorous barbs or innuendos at meetings and receptions. More than once, I restrained myself from giving him a punch."

"Don't forget Claire, you said it yourself: This conference is one of the most important of your career," Regina reminded her. "Whatever happens, inhale, exhale deeply and raise a little smile."

Having just heard the redhead mention her post and her colleague saying her name, Gray realized that she was their aunt, Claire Dearing.  
He paid even more attention to their discussion.

"I still have a minimum of self-control, Regina," retorted Dearing. "Respond to him in public if I think that he crosses the line would serve myself badly and benefit him. Especially since potential sponsors will be present and I will not let these big fish escape my nets because I would have momentarily lost my temper. I'm lucky that Henry is on the island only occasionally and not full time. But hey, he has to be there to present the novelty. Without his explanations, the reporters won't understand any of our speech and stare at us blankly. And this is without considering the fact that neither me nor you have attended a biology class since high school, we run the risk of stammering like primary school kids tested by their teacher if one start asking questions and if that happens, our conference is likely to make a monumental flop, or be mocked by Mickey's suckers! It's out of the question for people to laugh when my name will be mentioned during the next IAAPA meeting (**). So, it pisses me off to say this but it's a good thing that he is there as planned."

She turned her gaze to the Rotunda and when she saw her assistant and Zach among the visitors, she said:

"Ah, here they are! I will join you later."

Dearing took her leave of her two colleagues and as they returned to the corridor from which they came from, the park director went down the steps and headed for the centre of the Rotunda where she was awaited.

She hailed the eldest of her nephews and he turned around.

"Hi Claire!"

He stepped forward to give her a kiss on the cheek.

"It's cool to see you again," he said.

Dearing looked up at her nephew, noting that he had grown a lot since the last time she had seen him.

"You have grown up well since," she said, "and you became a handsome young man! A real lady-killer!" She added, patting him on the shoulder.

Then she turned to Gray who was standing a little behind.

"Hi," he said shyly.

Actually, he was a little intimidated by her aunt.  
While she had given his brother a warm welcome, Gray was a little disconcerted by the fact that she was not reluctant to use familiar expressions as well as by the proud tone with which she talked earlier when speaking about the conference and her colleague. She was not exactly as he imagined ...  
He thought she was beautiful though. Her athletic shoulders and slender legs showed that she took the care of staying in a good shape and a faint blush had been applied on the fair skin of her high cheekbones. Self-image seemed to be a very important concept for his aunt.  
Gray saw her staring at him, with eyes of the same emerald green as those of the snakes engraved on the silver ring she wore on her right index finger, where the reptiles were wrapped around a red stone.  
She also wore a silver watch around her left wrist.

"Hello," she said, leaning over to kiss him. "You're a very cute boy, you know, just like the last time I saw you."

She straightened up and looked at Zach.

"When was it?" She wondered. "Eight years ago?"

"Ten," Zach.

"Time flies..." She said thoughtfully. "Well, it was close enough."

She looked at their wrists and saw that they had put the wristbands they had been given at the ticket office.

"I see you have your wristbands, good. Before I forget…"

Dearing pulled an envelope out of her suit's pocket and handed it to Zach, who immediately put it in his jeans pocket.

"It's money to buy you some food for today," she clarified.

"You don't come with us?" Zach asked.

"Oh, I would love to, but I will be very busy for the day as I told you in my message. Zara will take good care of you until I finish work this evening, ok?"

"You know Claire, it's not necessary...," the elder started while looking at Young who seemed a little annoyed by the news.

"Your mother has been very clear and she wants you to be accompanied," interrupted his aunt. "You know very well how insistent she can be," she whispered to him.

She turned her head towards Gray.  
He was looking absent-mindedly at the southwestern archway, leading to the area of the Centre that was devoted to the history of palaeontology and life on Earth.

"But I promise you that from tomorrow, I will be with you and I will show you more specifically the behind the scenes. It should please both of you. I will meet you tonight at the Avenue, let's say half-past six, so we can go have dinner together. What do you think?"

"That works for me," Zach approved.

"Why not," Gray said, shrugging his shoulders.

"Since we agree, I will not hold you back any longer. As long as it's not too hot, I recommend you to start with the Zoo. There will be a tyrannosaur feeding in less than an hour, a show not to be missed!"

"The T. rex? It can be cool," Zach said.

"And then," continued Dearing, "you can come back here and enjoy the freshness of the halls and corridors during the hottest hours of the day."

The two brothers approved this advice by nodding slightly and their aunt prepared to leave.

"But it's your day, organize yourself as you want. Have fun!" She wished them. "And Zara, take good care of them!" She said to her assistant.

"Understood," Young replied.

Dearing turned around and returned to the gallery before taking the north-eastern arch and disappearing from their sight.

Young motioned them to follow her towards the entrance hall.

"Rather short for an introduction..." Gray mumbled.

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) Geological epoch extending over the last ten thousand years.

(**) IAAPA: _International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions_


	8. The Zoo

They left the Centre and headed to the northeastern gate, taking a wide path that passed through a tunnel dug under the spur of the false mountain and high enough to let through a ten-ton truck.  
On the other side of the tunnel, the path continued a little in the middle of a dense vegetation before splitting into two others: The one on their right went east and skirted the north side of the pond while the one on their left forked north to the Zoo.

This area, the oldest of the park, housed all kinds of animals in exhibits adapted to the needs of each species and which had nothing to envy to those of the greatest zoos on the planet.  
The lush vegetation lining the paths provided some shade to the visitors, which helped them withstand the heath of the Costa Rican sun.

Near quarter to ten, the two brothers and Young arrived at the petting zoo, similar to those existing in large US zoos where a whole area was dedicated to domestic animals as well as some small wild species considered as attractive for children.  
At Jurassic World, the concept had of course been transposed to some prehistoric species.

At the entrance of this area, Gray put some coins in some kind of vending machine and got a bag containing special granules, reserved for the animals of the petting zoo.  
They then passed a revolving door, entering a paddock where visitors could approach and pet several small species of herbivores as well as the juveniles of larger species.  
They barely had the time to make a few steps inside the paddock that a group of dinosaurs with a white plumage speckled with brown and streaked with black came to Gray when they saw that he had a bag of granules.  
These dinosaurs, _Avimimus_ , had a head that resembled that of a hen and were one and a half meters long.  
The species showed a sexual dimorphism: While the males' feathers had shades of blue and green on the head and the neck, the females' ones were much duller.

Gray took a handful of granules out of his bag and then held his hand flat.  
The _Avimimus_ then began pecking the granules in his hand, making jerky head movements like birds while Gray stroked the feathers of one of them.

As soon as they had eaten all the granules that he had given them, the trio proceeded, petting and feeding other animals along the way, including dark green skinned and brown-spotted hypsilophodons as a well as a third species, a light brown quadruped dinosaur the size of a sheep, short-legged and whose neck, sides and back were lined with osteoderms: A _Kunbarassaurus_ , an ankylosaurian from Australia.  
A little further away, children and some parents were gathered in front of the wooden fence of an adjoining corral and feeding other dinosaurs.  
These were not small species but juveniles of larger animals, which could be found in other areas of the park.  
Thus, they saw inside young hadrosaurs and apatosaurs, hardly bigger than an alpaca. The latter, whose skin had a brownish grey colour, stretched their long neck over the fence to eat the granules or cycads leaves in the palm of the delighted visitors' hands.

Zach thought that a playground-like atmosphere reigned in the petting zoo because while a majority of the young visitors behaved calmly and were respectful towards the animals, some particularly unruly were entertaining themselves by pursuing a _Hypsilophodon_ or an _Avimimus_ to the corral where the pursued animals sneaked under the fence to seek refuge inside. But sometimes, cornered dinosaurs attempted to escape the children by behaving more violent than usual.  
In one corner of the paddock, a park keeper, recognizable by the olive T-shirt and beige trousers he was wearing, was having an argument with a couple of visitors screaming at him, showing a scratch on their toddler's knee and pointing at a kunbarrasaur lying in the dust.

They came out of the enclosure by taking another revolving door and passed behind a group of visitors looking inside a paddock that looked like a riding arena with its half-muddy, half-sandy substrate.  
A park keeper was watching over children mounted on ceratopsian juveniles, about the size of a Shetland pony. As the physical differences existing between the different mounts attested, they did not all belonged to the same species and there were not only _Triceratops_ but also pachyrhinosaurs and chasmosaurs, more slender and leggy than the first two.

After taking a picture, Gray noticed the large amount of children lined before the paddock entrance.  
Knowing that Zach and Miss Young would be reluctant to wait until it was his turn, Gray thought he might ride one of the young horned dinosaurs later in the day or on another one.  
In addition, the tyrannosaur feeding was more of a priority and they continued, passing in front of the beginning of the queue before walking by a series of enclosures with ochre or sand-coloured walls.

In one of them, Zach only saw a ball of quills nestled in a burrow in the middle of a shallow pit whose scenery evoked an arid environment.  
Wanting to know what was living there, the young man looked at the enclosure's information panel.  
There he saw a drawing of a small bipedal dinosaur with a body bristling with quills, a short beak as well as enlarged canine-like tooth on the lower jaw.  
The name of the species, _Pegomastax africana_ , was centred on the upper part of the panel.

"Damn, you're ugly!" Said Zach, looking at the drawn animal that, from his point of view, looked like the cross between a porcupine and a parrot.

The panel also had the particularity to feature the following message in red "Careful! I bite!"  
As the _Pegomastax_ didn't seem to leave his burrow and fully show itself, they proceeded.

Near the end of the petting zoo, they passed in front of the top of some bleachers, sheltered under a large tent and where an audience was attending a presentation held by two park keepers, who animated it from a stage where a small flying reptile called _Dimorphodon_ was climbing up a trunk with its claws.  
The pterosaur's head, striped with red, blue and yellow, was rather big and its jaws were filled with small pointed teeth, ideal for catching insects and other small animals.  
Filamentous structures that looked like mammalian hair, pycnofibres, covered its body and were brown on the back and red on the underside.

Once it reached the top of the trunk, the pterosaur crawled along the highest branch, spread its wings and jumped into the air, gliding in the same way as the flying squirrels of the Asian rainforests.  
The visitors barely had time to admire its flight that the pterosaur landed on the falconer's glove worn by one of the keepers.  
While he was talking about the species, the keeper grabbed a mouse in a bucket but as he was about to show it to the pterosaur, the latter did not wait and brutally seized the rodent between its jaws.

Since the keeper didn't catch it in the act, the audience laughed.

"Easy, you little glutton!" He exclaimed in his microphone as the _Dimorphodon_ swallowed its meal greedily.

Gray turned and saw a screen on the other side of the path. The schedules of various shows and feedings as well as their status and locations were displayed.  
His eyes stopped at the line concerning the Tyrannosaur Kingdom and he noticed that the feeding was beginning in ten minutes.

At a junction not far away, they turned west and Gray, excited, began to walk faster and faster.  
Seeing that Zach was taking his time and that Young, who was on her phone, talking to her mother about some caterer and ceremony costs, was also walking slowly, he urged them to speed up:

"Come on!"

"Slow down, what's the rush?" Retorted his brother. "It's not so far," he added, pointing to the Discovery Center not far, and beside which was the tyrannosaur enclosure.

"Is your brother always like this?" Asked the assistant to the elder, momentarily interrupting her phone conversation.

"Unfortunately yes, I always said that we must put him on a leash and with this crowd, I think it could be a good idea," he replied as he watched the dozens of visitors converging in the same direction as them.

As they hurried in order to attend the feeding in time, they passed several other enclosures.  
One of them, with an earthy soil and of a surface of one hectare, was overhung by the path and on a good part of its perimeter was delimited by an electric fence consisting of thick steel poles with electric wires stretching between them, just in front of a dense curtain of trees while the Discovery Centre was towering in the background.  
The enclosure was embellished with scattered flowerbeds and trees providing shade for its denizens.

Lying in a muddy pool, the Mitchells saw two elephant-sized ceratopsians with dark grey skins.  
In the back of their huge skull equipped with a curved beak ideal for cutting ligneous matters, was a large frill trimmed with strange scarlet and black patterns, patterns that were also found on the flanks and the top of the legs .  
The frill had a prominent pair of horns that grew from it and extended upwards, and bore as well two additional small, curved, backward-pointed horns. In the middle of the frill, there was also another horn, pointing forward and curved at its end like a dagger.  
But the most iconic feature of the species was located at the level of the nose and the eyes, consisting of massive and flattened bosses, a large one over the nose and a smaller one above the eyes. These bosses were separated by a narrow gap and were covered by a thick layer of keratin, which role was to help fighting individuals to better withstand the shocks.

The animals in question, pachyrhinosaurs, were motionless and the children watching them were frustrated by this, with some screaming at them or calling them _bozos_ to wake them but the animals didn't care and one of them half-opened its eyes before closing them again and falling back to sleep.

A few minutes later, the trio arrived at the Tyrannosaur Kingdom, located about fifty meters west of the Discovery Center.  
The enclosure was delimited by high concrete walls, twelve meters high and covered with a layer of black artificial rock.  
Behind those, the crown of tall trees rose to the sky, indicating the presence of a small forest inside and which was recreating the habitat in which the tyrannosaur dwelt at the very end of the Cretaceous. Related or analogous plant species to those that lived at that time had been planted within the enclosure: redwoods, araucarias, magnolias, cypresses, subtropical or tropical ash trees or oaks, palm trees belonging to the _Sabal_ genus, cycads, and one or two ginkgoes while the ground was covered by ferns.

They took a tunnel going under the walls and entered a room furnished with panels on the evolution of the _Tyrannosauridae_ family or the ecosystem of Hell Creek, the geological formation in which was found the majority of _Tyrannosaurus_ ' remains as well as those of other iconic dinosaur like _Triceratops_ , _Ankylosaurus_ or _Edmontosaurus_.  
The Mitchells and Young crossed the room and with other visitors, entered into one of the two galleries opening on the exhibition room and followed a sign pointing the fallen trunk viewing point.  
Natural light reached the gallery through a series of small rectangular windows on the upper part of the walls. Looking through one of them, Zach noticed that his head was at the same level as the forest's soil and looking up, he saw the huge redwoods trunks rising like towers. On the other side of the gallery, the scenery was similar and he concluded that they were crossing the enclosure.

A circular room appeared at the end of the gallery and the visitors took a spiral staircase built around a lift shaft. The place had a strong smell of wood, the latter being the main material around and through small interstices in the walls, one could take a look outside.  
In truth, this staircase was located within a fake redwood snag and communicated with the fallen trunk viewpoint at the level of the top of the stairs. There, a doorframe opened on a long and narrow viewing bay whose glass window was large and concave. A crowd of visitors had already packed together in front of it.

Once there, Gray made his way to the window in order to look inside the enclosure. They were more than three meters above the ground and the bay overlooked a small clearing.  
At the opposite of the clearing, beyond a wide moat, bleachers were occupied by other visitors, looking towards the trees with a great interest, ecstatic at the idea of being confronted with the king of dinosaurs.  
On either side of the fallen trunk, high thickets stretched at the rim of the clearing.

Suddenly, the attention of all the visitors was attracted by a trapdoor which opened in the middle of the clearing, letting a small platform rise to ground level. A brown and white goat was standing on it and bleatings were heard by the audience. An expression mixing concern and excitement could be read on the visitors faces.  
However, by looking carefully, some saw that the goat was perfectly static.

" _Do not worry, the goat is already dead. In virtue of international regulations, Jurassic World's carnivores are not fed live livestock animals_ ," reassured a voice in the speakers, speaking with a British accent. " _She is standing up thanks to straps on her legs and the bleating comes from a hidden speaker near the trapdoor_."

The voice was the one of the park keeper supervising the feeding. The visitors in the viewing bay looked for him for a while before finding him inside a cage suspended ten meters above the ground, alongside a small group of visitors who paid an additional fee to go with him. Zach also noticed the presence of another person, wearing grey-green fatigues and armed with a rifle.  
He saw him share a few words with the keeper and judging by the way they interacted, the two men seemed to know each other and to usually collaborate.

Suddenly, the visitors sitting in the bleachers had an exclamation of surprise and a large biped and brownish shape with grey and dark brown dorsal stripes appeared on the right of the people inside the viewing bay, passing in front of it as it was heading towards the goat.  
Turning her back to the trunk, the tyrannosaur lowered her massive head and seized the goat between her jaws to violently shake it under the petrified gaze of the visitors. As she was swallowing her meal, the keeper was telling the audience facts about the behaviour and the biology of the species.  
The T. rex then scanned the bleachers and stepped forward before walking along the moat, looking at the audience, her maw ajar and an amber eye staring at it.

"Roberta!" Called the keeper, a tall blond man in his fifties "Over there, granny!"

The tyrannosaur turned away from the moat, passing her tail over it and looked upwards towards the cage before approaching it.  
The keeper threw some meat over the guardrail of the cage and it fell on the ground. Roberta smelled it before grabbing it with her teeth.

"After you," said the keeper to one of his companions.

The visitor grabbed a piece of meat the size of a directory and threw it at the tyrannosaur that was eyeing the cage.  
When she caught the meat mid-air, Gray let out an admiring shout and continued to gaze at the animal.  
He noticed that the carnivore had scars on the right side of the neck as well as on the snout and although he knew that the animal had roamed the island freely for years, he wondered how she got them exactly.

But when he turned around, he was disturbed by the behaviour of many visitors, including his two companions. While Young was still talking with her mother, Zach was on his phone, looking absent-minded, not even starting at each growl of the predator, and he saw several visitors stop in front of the window, pose for a selfie with the animal behind them before leaving right away, tapping away on their phones, as if seeing a dinosaur in the flesh was just an experience among many, as common as seeing a 3D film or riding on a rollercoaster.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _Hypothetical Casting:_

 _ **Iain Glen** as Jonas Roth, the park keeper supervising the T. rex feeding._


	9. Conference

"While year after year our revenue continues to climb, operating costs are higher than ever," Claire Dearing explained to the audience sitting in front of her in the Jeffery Hudson Conference Room, located within the north-eastern spur of the Discovery Centre.

Named in honor of a successful novelist who was one of the park's patrons until his death in 2008, the room was the place where Dearing invited the press every year to present the upcoming novelties of the park.  
It was decorated with potted plants and fossils replicas, embedded in the walls and including a six-meter-long _Ichthyosauridae_ and a _Struthiomimus_. To the north, a balcony overlooked the Zoo and the jungle beyond.

About forty reporters were attending the conference and watching the slide show on the big screen behind Dearing while taking notes, just like Janet Kawalsky, the park's press attaché, sitting in the front row.  
The reporters were not the only attendants since a small group of two men and one woman in suits, representatives of a potential sponsor, sat as well in front row. Dearing often looked at them, taking great care to captivate their attention.

"Nowadays, in the eyes of ordinary people, de-extinction has become as familiar as computers or travels to the other side of the globe since everyone can take a look at animals that were once considered extinct, either in the flesh, either through documentaries footage or those available on the Internet."

A screenshot of a video titled " _These dinosaurs eat fermented fruits, find out what happens after !"_ and counting a few hundred million views appeared on the screen, raising some laughs in the audience, whose majority of members had already viewed said video at least once, the latter having been shared all around the Web.  
Dearing pressed a button on her pointer and the screenshot gave way to photos taken by visitors to Jurassic World, each containing at least a few hashtags in their descriptions.

"Since a few years, we are no longer the only establishment housing extinct animals since we have sold animals to more than twenty zoos and aquaria around the world…"

On the screen, the logos of the concerned establishments appeared on the slide and among them, were those of some of the most visited and renowned zoos of their respective nations.  
A few seconds later, Dearing went to the next slide, which showed pictures of the sold InGen's animals in the enclosures of said zoos.

On one of the pictures, a crowd of visitors was gathered near a feeding platform, located at the edge of a grassy enclosure, observing the two _Parasaurolophus_ and a _Pachycephalosaurus_ that had come closer while on another, visitors were grouped in front of a large window pane, in awe before a _Baryonyx_ almost completely immersed in a basin surrounded by tropical plants, letting only the tip of its snout sticking out of the water's surface. The captions under the photos indicated that the first had been taken in France and the second in Singapore.

"Today, many children born after the second half of the 2000s look at a stegosaur in the same way they would look at an elephant from the city zoo since they never knew a world where recreating, and approaching safely, extinct species was nothing short of a miracle, if not considered as impossible."

She paused and resumed her speech.

"However, that does not mean that we are resting on our laurels, far from it. Offering novelties to visitors is crucial in order to encourage them to come back and this is reflected in our attendance figures, since each time we open a new attraction, visitors arrive in droves. Eventually, we want to open a big attraction each year and the richness of our genomic bank allows us to imagine a whole range of biological attractions. Where around thirty Mesozoic species had been cloned for the Jurassic Park project, our plant in San Diego currently contains embryos of more than two hundred and fifty species from not only the Mesozoic but also the Paleozoic and the Cenozoic."

As she was saying these words, representations of animals recreated by the corporation began to appear on the screen, faster and faster until they formed a mosaic forming InGen's logo.

"This list only gets longer year after year which is good since we plan to open other parks around the world by 2025, one in the Mediterranean and another in southern China. But let's face it, adding to our collection half a dozen of bird species from Cretaceous China or a Triassic marine reptile that looks like it's straight out of a sci-fi movie will not move crowds. No, the public wants animals that are bigger, louder... meaner. I'm going to ask a question to our dear guests here: What kind of attraction do you want to sponsor?" Dearing asked the representatives.

One of them, a fat and bald man, raised his hand.

"Yes, Mr. Hosterly?"

"One that excites us and glue us on the spot," he replied.

Dearing smiled. She had expected a response similar to this one.

"That is a good thing. The good news is that our advances in genetics have recently opened a whole new frontier and allowed the designing of the upcoming attraction, which fits the description you just gave, Mr. Hosterly."

"Which is the star animal of this next attraction?" Asked one of the reporters.

"I can start by telling you that no fossil remains of this animal has been found," said Dearing, "and the chances of that happening are near zero, if not utterly impossible," she added with a touch of mystery.

The members of the audience exchanged strange looks and began whispering to each other.

"This is an animal of a new kind, a pioneer. An unprecedented creature that will scare young and old alike," described Dearing.

She paused momentarily to catch her breath before resuming in a voice full of self-assurance and pride.

"Let me introduce _Indominus rex_ , the first manmade dinosaur species. Our first hybrid."

Many had exclamations of surprise after this reveal and discussions resumed again before being interrupted by a threatening music coming from the speakers and serving as the soundtrack of a video presentation on the screen that showed a CGI reconstruction of some kind of a modern version of an ancient arena.

"In an arena of more than eight thousand seats that can be plunged into darkness thanks to a system of sliding walls, you will witness the might and the bestiality of this creature."

The video then showed a portcullis blocking a dark tunnel being raised, then the image went black and a monstrous cry was suddenly heard, making the audience jump. On the screen, one could read:

 **I. rex Coliseum**

 _Opening in July 2018_

The logo of the park as well as those of InGen and Masrani Global appeared and the attendants, won over by the talk, applauded.

"Thank you. Thank you. Now, I'm going to let Professor Henry Wu tell you more about the exact nature of this animal."

Behind her, a man of Asian descent that was sitting until then on a chair next to Regina Powers, the public relations manager, got up and walked to the edge of the dais as Dearing was going to sit next to Powers.

"Thank you, Claire," he said to her when she passed him the pointer without saying a word.

Despite being in his mid-fifties, Wu looked younger than he was because of his wrinkle-free face and his clothing consisting of a tight black T-shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers.

"Before I start, is there any remarks?" He asked.

One of the reporters raised his hand.

"Yes?"

"Ms Dearing has just said that it was a hybrid. By hybrid, do you mean something like the ligron, which is the offspring of a male lion and a tigress? If so, how did you get two individuals from different species to breed together?"

"The _Indominus rex_ , or _I. rex_ as we like to call it, was not conceived through a sexual reproduction between two different species in the same way as the ligron, the whalphin or the mule. Unlike them, she has no parents and she was created from scratch by using far more than the genome of two different species," Wu explained.  
"Therefore, hybrid is not the adequate term but it is more sales-oriented according to our marketing experts ... as well as management," he added, giving a sidelong glance to Dearing.

She responded with a smile that Powers saw that it was forced.

"Without further ado, I'm going to let one of our beloved mascots tell you more about how we have designed it in a promotional video that will be put online this evening. Good viewing."

He turned to the screen and pressed on the pointer before quickly joining a chair on Dearing's right while the video started.

It opened on the park's labs, showing lab workers in white coats being busy, drilling pieces of amber containing insects, setting the parameters of a centrifuge or watching a genetic code parading across a computer screen.  
Suddenly, the lid of a test tube was raised and a multi-coloured whirl came out to move towards the middle of the room.  
There he took the form of a filiform figure consisting of a series of white, red, yellow and blue balls, each colour being associated with one of the four types of nitrogenous bases constituting a strand of DNA.  
It looked at the camera with its big eyes.

" _Hello friends. For those who do not know me, I introduce myself: Mr. DNA, one of Jurassic World's mascots. I'm talking to you from the Norman Atherton Laboratories of the Discovery Centre, an incredible state-of-the-art facility where InGen scientists put their best efforts into reconstructing the genome of long-gone species. However, we will not talk about this today even if I invite those for whom it is an unknown or difficult topic to understand to see or see again the video where I explain our methods of cloning, displayed during the visit but also available on our Youtube channel. Just click here_ ," he said, pointing the thumbnail of a video in the lower left corner of the screen.

"So, you expect to let a cartoon character provide explanations for you? You rest on your laurels, my dear..." Dearing whispered to Wu in a sneering tone.

"Quite the opposite, Claire. I was involved in the writing the video in addition to the consultant work that was asked of me. Popularization is not easy, you know."

Dearing looked up at the screen.

" _This video is the first of a series dedicated to the great 2018 novelty of the park_ ," said Mr. DNA, " _and today, I have the pleasure to reveal its nature and discuss about it with a guest of honor. A fantastic and brilliant individual without whom Jurassic World could not have existed and the main creative genius behind our novelty. Of course, I meant the eminent Doctor... uh Professor Henry Wu._ "

Footsteps came from an adjacent hallway.

" _I think he's coming_ ," whispered Mr DNA to the camera.

A door opened, letting Wu into the room.

" _Ah, Mr. DNA!_ " The geneticist said in a cheerful voice. " _You are finally out of your test tube!_ "

"And as you can see, I play in it too ..." Wu pointed out to the director who made a small disdainful sound.

For a few minutes, Wu and Mr. DNA explained with a lot of models and diagrams how it was possible to create a completely new species from pieces of the genomes of existing species that were assembled together, in a similar way of paint's samples that were mixed in order to obtain a certain colour.  
As they explained just before, InGen's animals were not really natural since the gaps within the fragments of DNA found in amber or fossils had been filled with genes from modern animals, mainly amphibians, reptiles and birds, an action that had repercussions on the behaviour or the physical features of the animal in some cases.  
Thus, and as Wu demonstrated by illustrating his words with photographs of cloned animals, some of them did not look much like the original creatures that lived during the Mesozoic.  
With de-extinction being in its infancy in the late eighties and the early nineties, Wu and his teams were striving at the time in recreating extinct species in the best way possible with the means and the time they had, along with the palaeontological knowledge of the time.  
Sometimes they used the DNA of species already cloned to recreate new ones or even, mixed those of animals that were classified within the same genus according to the classification of the time, creating what Wu called "unofficial hybrids" of which he gave an example, that of the "velociraptors".

Actually, those had nothing in common with their fossil namesakes, _Velociraptor mongoliensis_ and _Velociraptor osmolkae_ , since they mainly resulted from a genetic cross between _Deinonychus antirrhopus_ and _Achillobator giganticus_ , named respectively _Velociraptor antirrhopus_ and _Velociraptor giganticus_ in a classification of the time made by the palaeontologist Gregory S. Paul, classification then used by InGen teams who were satisfied with the fact that the fragments of paleo-DNA came from animals of the genus _Velociraptor_ , without worrying about the origin of the fossils and ambers, collected in different parts of the globe, or the differences between species.  
When this error became apparent in the 2000s, the two existing subspecies of InGen's "velociraptors" were classified within the new taxon of _Neoraptor athertonii_ , a brand new dinosaur species, manmade but non-intentionally however, unlike _Indominus rex_.

With the latter, the aim differed in the sense that creating a new species was precisely the goal to reach and the principle was broadly to balance the proportions of genomes coming from the different species chosen within the creature's final genome instead of ensuring that the fragments of paleo-DNA from the species to recreate constitutes the majority of the genomic composition, and this in order to make the different species features to stand out in the best way possible in the final product.

At one point, Dearing could not help chuckling when she saw Mr. DNA resting on Wu's shoulder like a Capuchin on a pirate's because the special effect was failed in her opinion (according to some, she would have said that Mr. DNA had a "crack junkie" head).  
But the audience laughed heartily at the manners and jokes of the anthropomorphic enzyme and in the end, the video made an impression as strong, if not more, as the one presented by Dearing, which was not to her liking.

Once the video ended, Wu returned to the front of the dais in order to add a few clarifications to the video and to resume his talk.


	10. Journey over the Island

They ended the conference at ten forty-five and left the building to join a parking lot at the entrance to the Western Residential District, where several shuttle buses adorned with the park's logo, a white _Tyrannosaurus_ skeleton against a backdrop consisting of a night sky streaked with lightning above the glowing summit of an erupting volcano.  
While the reporters as well as Wu, Powers and Kawalski were getting into the shuttles, Dearing took with her Hosterly and his two colleagues, Erica Brand, a tall, elegant woman with olive skin and long black hair, and Jim Drucker, a skinny man with brown and curly hair. The four of them got in a separate shuttle, smaller and open to the outside.

The driver started as soon as Dearing gave him the instruction and the group of vehicles first took the direction of the slopes at the foot of the plateau before forking to the north and separating at an intersection somewhere west of the Tyrannosaur Kingdom. While the shuttles carrying the reporters and Dearing's colleagues took a cliff route overlooking on a short distance the enclosure and running at the base of a rocky spur eighty meters high, theirs took a hill road which led them in direction of a flat space between the edges of the plateau and the spur.

The latter stretched east on more than one hundred and thirty meters before narrowing suddenly to form a promontory with sharp edges, giving to the rocky mass the same shape as the bow of a ship.  
At the top of the spur, stood the administrative building, a low, long structure with a densely vegetated roof, even crowned with trees, and facades of the same colour as the rock below. Thus, from afar and Burroughs, only those knowing the place could distinguish the building from the rock on which it rested.  
The representatives only saw it later but between the car park they passed by and the building itself, there was a chasm that could only be crossed at a bridge leading to the steps before the entrance of the building, which was similar in a certain way to a quasi-impregnable fortress or a secluded monastery.  
Once the Administration behind them, the road slowly descended amid the dense vegetation of the jungle, up to a crossroads where the shuttle went to the left, following the dirt track that entered into a narrow gorge, deep and sinuous.

At a turn in the road several hundred of meters further, a high waterfall, narrow at the top and wide at its base, appeared and Dearing heard Hosterly whistle in awe.  
The shuttle headed towards it and stopped at the end of the road, just in front of a small, thatched hut-like building next to a heliport, originally built for Jurassic Park and used as a landing place for helicopters carrying VIPs as well as a starting point for the helicopter tours.  
The passengers got out of the vehicle and Dearing invited the trio of representatives to enter the hut in order to wait there for the arrival of the aircraft that would take them to the I. rex Coliseum.

As Hosterly and his colleagues gazed at the waterfall and the watering hole in which it was throwing itself, they began to hear a roaring sound to the west and a few moments later, a white _Aérospatiale AS350 Écureuil_ with a green tail appeared from beyond the ridges and began its descent towards the tarmac _._  
When it landed and the blades rotation slowed down enough, the employee in pink polo assigned to the heliport's surveillance invited Dearing and the representatives to follow him and he opened the cabin's door for them.  
Dearing let the representatives go first, then she sat on the seat behind the pilot. The passengers buckled up, grabbed and put some headsets, then the employee closed the door and walked away from the helicopter as the take-off procedure was starting.  
The aircraft rose slowly in the air, almost parallel to the waterfall.

The pilot spoke in his microphone:

"Ladies and gentlemen, let me welcome you on board this aircraft," he declared in an Indian accent.

Dearing, who, when they had joined the aircraft, only glimpsed a tall and dark-skinned man in his late forties that wore a white linen shirt and blue silk pants, recognized the voice.

"Surprised to see me flying, Claire?" The pilot said, amused.

"Hello Mr. Masrani. A little surprised indeed, I did not know that you knew how to fly. How are you?"

"Very good, my dear. I had my flight license two weeks ago and I cannot wait to fly over the island myself. Carl is here to help me if needed," he said, looking at his co-pilot.

"Ah, I am forgetting my manners!" Dearing exclaimed, remembering the other passengers. "I introduce to you Hal Hosterly, Jim Drucker and Erica Brand, representatives of the _Global Broadcoasting Company_."

Masrani, turned to look at the trio from behind his sunglasses and greet them.

"So you are from the media? An environment that I know, being myself a major shareholder of one of the largest Indian channels."

"What an excellent surprise to have you with us, Mr. Masrani," Drucker said. "Ms Dearing did not mention that you were going to join us."

"Oh, she also wasn't expecting to see me," he told them, laughing. "On this matter, don't worry, Claire. I already told Alain that there will an additional cover. I just asked him to keep the secrecy around my arrival"

As the helicopter continued to climb, he turned toward the representatives.

"How is your stay on Isla Nublar?"

"Very pleasant," Brunet answered. "This place is really outside of time."

"Heaven on Earth, isn't it? If everything is fine, let's get going," Masrani said spiritedly. "Claire, show me this new dinosaur."

Leaving the Southern Plateau behind, the aircraft arrived at the level of the Rio Iris.  
Upstream, there was a large elongated lake whose northern shores had not a lot of trees, letting those on the other side having a glimpse of a part of the vast meadows that occupied the heart of the island and in the middle of which small dark dots could be seen from the distance. Downstream, the river entered into an increasingly narrow and high gorge, the narrowest point being just north of the crossroads taken by the shuttle. If they had gone straight, the road would have led them to a bridge spanning the gorge.

The helicopter passed halfway between the lake and this bridge, at a spot where the river was lined with several waterfalls and where they saw several animals: A herd of a dozen corythosaurs, duckbilled dinosaurs with a grey body marbled with yellow and stained with black, and whose main feature was the tall, elaborate and pale mauve crest on top of their skull that looked like a Corinthian helmet; and two adult apatosaurs, among the sturdiest of the sauropods and far from helpless against predators because of their relatively large size, twenty-two meters long, and their sets of spikes, one going down from the top of their skull to the striped and whip-shaped tail, and two others running under the neck.  
The corythosaurs were gathered on the bank, quenching their thirst, and one of the apatosaurs had advanced into the water, wetting its belly and watching a thirty-meter-long boat, built like a junk but without sails, cruising in the middle of the river, sailing eastward.

This boat was one of those of the Jungle Cruise, one of the longest and richest in animal species attractions.  
Each of them had three decks from which visitors could observe the animals.  
On the first two, they were separated from them by glass windows topped with railings while the upper one had only a guardrail for protection.

As the helicopter had slightly turned east, towards the Cartago, Masrani asked Dearing:

"So Claire, how's the park doing?"

"Business is good. We have observed an increase of the visitors' numbers by two and a half percent over last year. It is slightly below our initial projections though."

"Actually, I wanted to ask how things are going. If the visitors are having fun? The animals having a good life? That kind of things, you see?"

"Regarding visitors, their satisfaction rate is steady, in the low nineties. On the other hand, it is difficult to know if the animals are really liking their life."

"Yet it's very simple. One of my childhood friends used to say that you could know what animals feel just by looking in their eyes."

Masrani glanced over his shoulder and saw that Jim Drucker was holding on tightly to his seat and wasn't comfortable.

"Are you all right, Mr. Drucker?"

"Oh, it's just that I tend to be afraid of heights and I don't like turbulences. When I go to an amusement park, I never go on the rollercoasters," he replied.

"Don't worry. The helicopter ride will go smoothly. I got it," the tycoon assured him.

At the turn of a meander of the Cartago, the representatives saw one of the gateways that allowed the passage of the Jungle Cruise boats and prevented the animals of the attraction to leave their respective paddocks through the river itself.  
A boat had crossed the gateway a bit earlier and as it was sailing towards the beginning of the gorge located upstream, just in front of the imposing dome of the aviary, the helicopter's passengers saw big dark shapes heading towards the boat by undulating in the murky waters.

From the aircraft, one would have thought that they were large crocodiles and when one of the forms surfaced near the boat before disappearing just after, revealing a narrow snout that stretched forward, many could have been misled.  
On the upper deck of the boat, two park keepers wearing black fisherman's aprons hung some Arapaimas on the hooks of two small cranes, each being located on one side of the ship.  
Once the fish were hooked, the keepers swivelled the cranes so that the arapaimas were hung above the river, and barely this was done that the masters of this section of the river revealed themselves by jumping out of the water in a manner similar to those of the crocodiles and tried to catch the fish under the amazed gaze of visitors.

Not crocodiles but theropod dinosaurs adapted to a semi-aquatic lifestyle, the animals in question measured nine meters long for a shoulder height of two and a half meters and their bodies were pale olive green with the back of the skull, the snout's and the tail's extremities being orange while the head and the neck showed many grey, black or brown spots circled with cyan.  
Two pairs of barbels, one long and thin and the other very short and thicker, reminding those of the catfish and of a length that varied depending on the age or the sex, dangled at the end of the snout and gave to _Baryonyx_ a look reminiscent of the dragons from Eastern mythologies.  
While it was early assumed that the long barbels transmitted their vibrations to a sensory organ located at their base and were used to detect movements or temperature variations, palaeontologists and ethologists had for some time wondered about the usefulness of the short barbels until one of the park keepers accidentally discovered in a subadult that it was actually a very sensitive erogenous organ, which was consistent with the observations of individuals touching from the tip of their snout the barbels of their mate in a back and forth movement during the breeding season.  
Using one of its powerful arms equipped with a very large claw on the first finger, one of the _Baryonyx_ gripped on the railings above the bay window of the first deck and by folding back its neck, the dinosaur managed to catch one of the Arapaimas between the tips of its jaws and let itself fall in a great spray of water, splashing a bit the visitors on that deck.  
While a person in fatigues kept a watchful eye on the animals, the boat continued its crossing of the _Baryonyx_ territory and one of the animals, already full, returned to the bank.  
It laid there on his side and opened its mouth, letting birds land there and pecking the inside of its maw, searching parasites or pieces of fish stuck on the teeth.

The helicopter passed over a portion of the electric fence that bounded in the north the paddock of the piscivorous theropods and gained a little altitude in order to avoid flying too close from the large geodesic dome of the aviary.  
The representatives only noticed at that moment how enormous it was, with a diameter of four hundred meters or more for a height of two hundred.  
Between the struts forming the structure and which were shining through a light mist, there was no glass panels but a net with a tight mesh.  
Since the aviary had been built over the river, the Jungle Cruise crossed it and sometimes, when there was more haze than usual, the top of the dome was so high that it was difficult to see from the boats.

They skirted the aviary by the east, flying over hills covered by dense jungle.  
At the top of a ridge, they saw large pylons between which two cables were stretched, with cabins moving along it.  
The gondola lift track began at a pass in the Misty Mounts and crossed the island from east to west, up to a panoramic viewpoint south of Mount Sibo, crossing the Cartago Aviary and the Embrace valley on the way.  
While heading towards a cluster of buildings at a bend of the river, a village called the Jungle Trading Post and in which was located the terminus of the Jungle Cruise, the helicopter passed near the aviary and its passengers could observe its inside.

In the middle of the river, there was an island, of which a half was enclosed within the aviary and at its southern end, visitors aboard the gondola lift's cabins could stop at a station and visit the aviary.  
Several observation tunnels started at this station: one leaving the aviary to the north; a second joining an observation point located at the edge of a basin to the east, at the edge of a pond where flying reptiles dabbled or fished; and a third, going to the cliffs that constituted the western bank and where a series of cornices had been dug in the rock between some waterfalls so that pterosaurs could nest there.  
This tunnel also led to a lift that transported visitors up to the Pteratops Lodge, a circular building with elegant lines and many windows. It was also connected to rooms in the upper part of the cliffs and from those, visitors had an incredible view on the gorge and could enjoy the pterosaurs graceful flight at leisure.  
One of them, a _Tupandactylus imperator_ with a crimson body stained with black and a prominent vivid blue sagittal crest, flew close to the top of the dome, almost touching the steel arches supporting the structure in its entirety.

"Impressive, huh?" Masrani asked with a bit of pride. "The largest aviary in the world. You know," he said a few moments later, "when John Hammond asked me to create this place in order to allow people from all over the world to observe prehistoric animals in a secure environment and thus put a stop to the illegal tourism phenomenon which was going to develop around Isla Sorna in the years following his death, he never mentioned profits and all he said to me was to let my imagination ignite itself and to spare no expense."

Two kilometres further, a flock of American white ibis passed close to the helicopter as they flew straight to the northernmost summit of the Misty Mounts. On its western slopes, there was a particularly steep relief of volcanic origin in the middle of which flowed many torrents which in their flow, merged with each other to become larger watercourses that fell off the cliffs in the form of large waterfalls, ending up becoming the Cartago.  
A little higher in altitude, Masrani saw an oval basin dominated by a high waterfall. Although he had flown over the island several times in the past, he could not remember the presence of this isolated and seemingly peaceful place.

The helicopter suddenly turned west, heading for the spectacular valley of the Embrace.  
On the way, Dearing looked out the window and surprised herself by staring at a hexagonal-shaped pen lost in the middle of the jungle, as if, in spite of the height, she was looking for catching the sight of someone.

As they progressed, the jungle below became more and thinner, until it was dotted with numerous clearings here and there.  
Near one of them, Brand saw the long necks and little blue heads of a few bipeds and potbellied dinosaurs, rising above the foliage of the trees in the middle of which they fed by lowering the branches with their large arms ended by long claws.  
Dearing then told her that they were therizinosaurs, herbivores with a discreet behaviour and so mistrustful that they attacked whoever that came too close of them, and that one had to be lucky to see them on a safari. As they passed over them, Brand noticed that they were as tall as giraffes and that their bodies were covered with feathers, cream-colored on the underside and dark brown streaked with buff on the back.  
The helicopter entered into the Embrace.

Among a mosaic of meadows, groves and streams bordered by dense riparian forest, whole herds of several species of dinosaurs roamed a hilly landscape. A herd of duckbilled dinosaurs with a cranial crest which protruded from the rear of the head, _Parasaurolophus_ , walked in single file out of the undergrowth. The dominant male, of a pale brown colour and striped with a darker shade of brown, was ahead and the green-coloured females just behind him. Nearby, juvenile _Triceratops_ were playing in the middle of a tall patch of grass and two mamenchisaurs were feeding at the trees crown.  
Drucker took out his phone to take pictures.

Frightened by the passage of the helicopter, a horde of fifty beige and red-brown deer-sized animals, dryosaurs, ran away and in their flight, disturbed a herd of _Gallimimus_ , bipeds as well but larger and tawny coloured with dark brown stripes along their long necks and tails.  
The latter also began to run and they quickly passed by an off-road truck carrying visitors on board and the largest _Gallimimus_ specimens reaching a length of eight meters for a height of three, their race was an impressive show in itself.  
By looking behind his shoulder, Masrani saw that the passengers were looking through the windows.  
The representatives seemed to enjoy a lot the show that provided the dinosaurs and the landscape in which they roamed. Dearing was much more used to it, but she was smiling too, though in a less visibly manner.

"I know, it's beautiful," Masrani said.

"I'm taking pictures for my son," Drucker told him, "he is very fond of these animals."

"Jurassic World was built to remind us how recent and insignificant we are in the history of Earth and this is the kind of feeling on which you can't put a price on," Masrani declared.

The slopes of the mountain arch in the south were lined by the pylons of the gondola lift and the cabins came and went along the cable above the carefree dinosaurs.  
They reached the middle of the valley and the helicopter turned north.

As they passed near the mamenchisaurs, the representatives were surprised to see three riders between the two titans and two others on the top of a nearby hill.  
The grey-green fatigues worn by the riders indicated that they were not tourists but authorized persons and with their horses advancing peacefully, stopping from time to time to graze, they looked like ranchers watching over a herd.

"Mount Sibo," said Masrani, admiring the conical-shaped mountain and its bare slopes that stood high in front of them. "A sacred mountain for the Tun-Si, the indigenous people that lived on this island before it was bought by InGen. They consider it as a deity. According to the legend, it was built by all the animals of the world."

The aircraft crossed the mountain arch north of the Embrace and the representatives were confronted to a desolate landscape extending over several square kilometres south of the volcano, with lava fields and their jagged rocks as well many craters and mounds, an acid lake with turquoise blue water and fumaroles emerging from numerous fissures.

"As you can see, there is a strong geothermal activity around the volcano, which provides more than sixty percent of our electricity thanks to the geothermal power plant on the northern coast," Dearing added.

"Don't you fear the damage that an eruption can cause?" Brand asked with a hint of concern in her voice as she watched the desolate landscape.

"We have followed the recommendations of volcanologists and taken all necessary measures to protect our facilities and the visitors," Dearing told them. "In 2006, park attendance even increased because of the curious who wanted to witness the minor eruption that occurred that year. There is quite a few natural hot springs in the area and we have built a thermal resort nearby. There is nothing better than a bath in these springs to relax after a long day of labor or visit in the park."

Looking north-east through the window on the other side of the cabin, the park director saw the construction site of the I. rex Coliseum near the top of a big hill in the middle of the jungle.

"The Coliseum is in sight," she pointed to them.

Masrani saw the complex and changed course.


	11. Coliseum

Five hundred meters from the construction site, they passed over excavators digging a trench running south-east, one of the protective measures mentioned by Dearing a few moments earlier and whose purpose was to divert any eventual lava flow that many threaten the I. rex Coliseum.

The aircraft landed east of the complex, in the middle of a gravel surface just outside the boundaries of the construction site.  
Dearing and the representatives got out, as well as Masrani, who made a few steps before stopping and gazing proudly at the arena under construction, contiguous to the top of the hill.  
Workers were busy around the skeleton of future artificial rocks whose purpose would have been to conceal the high concrete facades of the Coliseum.  
Between the small group and the complex, earthmovers were drawing the outlines of a path that connected the attraction to an unfinished monorail station near which the shuttles had parked.

The reporters and Dearing's colleagues were gathered near the entrance of the construction site, guarded by two J-SEC officers (*), recognizable by their beige uniforms and caps.  
Masrani, Dearing and the representatives joined them, and when the Indian tycoon was going to greet Powers and Wu, the reporters rushed to him in order to inundate him with questions relating mainly to the attraction and the park.  
He answered some of them, then made his way to the public relations manager and the geneticist, who, like Dearing, were surprised by his visit on the island.

"Henry!" He shouted in a cheerful tone. "How are you my friend?"

"Hello, Simon. I'm fine thank you. I did not expect you to be on the island before the inauguration in July."

As they exchanged news, Dearing led the group through the construction site towards the entrance of a tunnel dug into the hill.

"Claire?" Masrani asked while the reporters were busy taking pictures of the construction work.

She slowed down and let him catch her up.

"Yes sir?"

"I thought that the Coliseum was to open in April in the first place, am I right?" He asked in a low voice.

"Yes, indeed."

"Why this delay?"

"It's the Grey Guard. It is bigger than expected so they insisted that we reinforce the safety of the arena, urging us consequently to redo work and delay the opening.  
It was either that, either they referred to the Committee on the Containment and Control of Deextincted Life Forms."

Masrani nodded, looking thoughtful.

"It was the most reasonable decision to make," he approved. "It is better to go along with the United Nations if we want to continue to operate this park as we intend to."

They took the tunnel and entered a room in which information panels covered by a tarpaulin had been placed against a wall, waiting to be hung there.  
The group crossed the room and ended up in a gallery that overlooked the Indominus enclosure, built in a cirque of volcanic origin.  
Masrani took off his sunglasses and hung them up on his shirt while they were walking towards an observation bay, where a tall, balding blond man in his fifties, one of the park keepers, was waiting for them.  
With him, there was another man, of a similar age, smaller, black-haired, and wearing grey-dark green fatigues: the uniform of the Grey Guard. A badge showing the Japanese flag was sewn on the right shoulder of his uniform, just below another with the logo of the organization, five white stars forming a crescent and accompanied by a roaring dragon. A label on the jacket indicated the name and the rank.  
While the presence of the blond was expected, he taking care of the I. rex, the one of the grey guard wasn't as much and Dearing sighed inwardly at his sight since it was Captain Katashi Hamada, the most high-ranking representative of the garrison that this international military organization had on Isla Nublar.  
His coming wasn't synonymous with good news.

The blond, a British man named Jonas Roth and acting as the chief park keeper and the theropods' curator, came forward to welcome the group.

"Greetings, ladies and gentlemen."

"Hello, Jonas," Dearing greeted him.

When she came to shake his hand, he leaned over to her ear.

"Hamada needs to talk with you," he informed her.

"Okay... I'll let you tell the group about your role while I do that."

Leaving the chief park keeper present his work to the reporters, the director went to speak with the Japanese.

"Claire. I apologize if I interrupt your tour but we need to talk about the bunkers again."

"Those you mentioned during the last council?"

"These ones, yes."

Dearing pretended to think for a moment, not being eager to discuss about this matter.

"Captain? Do you mind if we resume our conversation after the test showing? I don't want to keep Masrani and our guests waiting longer."

Hamada sighed.

"Of course," he said reluctantly. "I will wait here."

Dearing turned around and saw Masrani coming up closer to the window.  
The tycoon looked first inside the enclosure, then the rim.

The enclosure itself was embellished with several dense groves and some rocks here and there while in the centre, in front of the bay, there was a large rocky plateau similar to those for big cats in zoos. Behind the groves, Masrani distinguished the outlines of a twelve-meter high concrete wall, running from one end of the cirque to the other, and topped with thick steel bars, fixed obliquely in order to prevent an animal that has successfully climbed the wall from passing on the other side.

At each end of the wall, stood a watchtower, each occupied by one of Hamada's men.  
The more he looked at the enclosure, the more Masrani felt it looked like a high security prison, which was both good and bad news.  
The good being the fact that the new dinosaur had to be very dangerous, in compliance to his wishes to entertain a public eager for thrills. The bad one being that in the event of an accident, he didn't dare to imagine what would happen.  
In the meantime, the whole group looked for the enclosure's occupant.

"Where is he?" Hosterly asked.

"She must be at the back of the enclosure, hidden amidst the vegetation. Watching us without us knowing it," Roth told him. "Like many species of snakes, she is sensitive to infrared radiations."

Near one of the watchtowers, they saw a platform on which was a crane and where park keepers were busy, carrying an ox's carcass to hang it on the hook of the crane.

"He is fed with a crane?" Masrani asked to Dearing, whispering as she was standing right next to him.

She briefly glanced over her shoulder to check that the group wasn't listening to them.

"Yes. When it was not bigger than a lion, it was fed through the bars of its holding room but once, it managed to grab the wrist of one the keepers who almost lost his forearm. The others threatened to resign if I could not guarantee their safety. Hence the feeding with the crane."

"So this animal is quite smart?"

"For a dinosaur, yes," Dearing replied with some disdain.

Once the carcass was hung, the crane swivelled and extended its arm above the enclosure before letting the meat descend among the nearest grove.  
Several shouted in surprise when they saw black simian heads emerging from the treetops to look at the carcass with great curiosity.

"Look! There are monkeys in the enclosure!" One of the reports exclaimed.

"Howler monkeys," Roth specified. "Sometimes they pass over the wall by jumping from branches to branches or climbing the rock faces to go eat in the enclosure."

"Do you feed sometimes the Indominus with live animals?" Someone asked.

There was a brief exchange of glances between the park keeper and Dearing before the first answered:

"Like many zoos on the planet, we are subject to a rule prohibiting us from feeding our carnivores with live livestock animals."

He cleared his throat and continued:

"To be honest, even if we could, I would be opposed to this."

"Especially not for her," Hamada added.

Everyone then turned to him as he had stand apart until then.

"And why?" Brand asked.

"When I was a child, I had a snake, Mamushi. I gave him only dead mice to eat until the day friends came home. They wanted to see it in action and we then threw a live mouse into the terrarium. Mamushi watched it for a while. The mouse, on the other hand, was calmly exploring the terrarium, thinking that it was its new home..." Hamada told.

With his hand, he imitated a snake opening wide its jaws in order to catch a prey.

"All of a sudden," Hamada continued, "Mamushi's jaws closed on the rodent whose little heart first accelerated, then slowed down before finally stopping. After that, Mamushi refused to eat any dead mice that were given to him: He wanted only live prey. Believe me, you wouldn't want that this animals taste something that moves and bleeds."

"Come on captain, don't scare our guests," Powers said in a casual tone in order to reassure the group, uncomfortable following the story of the Japanese which looked more like a warning than anything else.

Suddenly, one of the monkeys let out an alarm call and the whole troop fled, leaping from branch to branch up to the rocky walls they climbed while uttering frightened cries that echoed in the observation bay.  
Another scream, more guttural and primitive but above all more powerful, was heard, making everyone but Hamada jump. The captain of the guards, though impassive, stayed alert.  
The group came closer to the window, excited by the thought of the I. rex finally showing up.  
Amidst the trees, a gigantic white form began to move, hidden behind the dense vegetation and trampling branches under its feet.  
Of the animal, one could only distinguish a few patches of scaly skin lined with osteoderms.

"Wow!" Exclaimed one of the reporters.

"He is white?" Masrani noticed, disturbed by this fact. "You did not tell me he was white," he said to Dearing in a slight resentful tone.

"Because it was originally supposed to be a darker color. According to Henry, the fact that its scales are mainly white is the result of a side effect of genetic hybridization. This is what I understood, at least."

"That's it, indeed," Wu confirmed.

The beast stopped, seeming to watch the group from behind a curtain of foliage.

"Amazing," Hosterly said.

One of the reporters, short brown hair, small in size and glasses with striking frames resting on her pointed and snub nose, tried to take a picture on the sly with her cell phone.

"Pictures of the animal are forbidden!" A loud voice boomed behind her, the one of the two J-SEC officers they had seen at the entrance.

"I was just checking the time," she replied curtly, barely looking at her interlocutor in the eyes.

The officer, a colossus with a square face, was not fooled by this excuse.

"I don't care. If you do this again, I would be forced to confiscate your device." Dearing turned towards them, scowling at the reporter.

"Miss Landis, don't forget that you signed a clause in which it was clearly stipulated that you had the right to photograph only the facilities. You don't want to be sued? I guess so. In this case, you just have to stick to the terms!" She warned her in a tone that, although neutral, showed some animosity.

Sighing, the reporter put her cell phone back in her pocket while everyone gave her an embarrassed look but she didn't care about that and Dearing even thought that the young woman insulted her in a whisper, but the park director stayed calm, only clenching her fists, before returning next to Masrani.  
If it was all up to her, she would have threatened to throw the reporter to the Indominus so that she could take pictures of her from all angles, but she wanted at all costs to maintain a good image of herself in the eyes of the representatives and especially of those of Masrani, who had enough power to order InGen to get rid of a park director with a bad image.

"Do you think it will scare children?" She asked Masrani once the group had resumed the observation of the I. rex, which stood still behind the dense foliage.

"He will give parents nightmares."

He was totally captivated by the creature.

"Look at them," He added, speaking of the group which was almost massed together in front of the window. "He will be perfect."

They stayed quiet for a few seconds as they watched the creature going deeper into her enclosure before Masrani spoke again, taking care to speak low enough to be heard only by Dearing.

"Weren't there two individuals?"

"We actually created two if one of them died prematurely."

"Where is the other then?" questioned Masrani in an increasingly inquisitive tone.

Dearing started to nervously pat on her suit with her fingertips.  
Since the beginning of the tour of the complex, she had practically only told him about mishaps and even incidents with the Indominus and she wasn't sure how he will take the answer to his last question.

"It devoured its sibling," she replied nervously.

Masrani frowned and began to stroke his beard.

"I must admit that I am a little worried about his behaviour and I would like to have the confirmation that the attraction is safe. Have you consulted an animal behaviour expert?"

"Jonas has a lot of experience with large carnivorous theropods in a captive environment," said Dearing. "He is even the world specialist in this field and has been heavily involved in the design of the facility."

"Surely. But I would also like, if it hasn't already been done, that you ask for the opinion of another keeper, a former member of the US Navy's marine mammal program. He is at the helm of the research program concerning the raptors. Hoskins had told me about him in an email. What is his name again? Brady? Brody?"

"Grady."

"Grady, yes, of course. Owen Grady, it's coming back to me. Do you know him a little?"

"I know him, yes," replied Dearing while her face showed an annoyed look.

"His animals often try to escape. They are smart and he must be smarter than them."

"He thinks he is smarter," she said disdainfully.

"Whatever," Masrani said, noticing that something went wrong at some point between her and Grady. "I would like you to bring him here, so that he can examine the facilities in detail and become familiar with the animal. He could eventually detect problems in his behaviour."

Dearing looked at her watch and saw that it was almost half-past eleven, the time she had planned what she liked to call the test showing, in reference to the test screenings that existed within the entertainment industry and whose purpose where to get reactions from a small audience and orientate the film or TV episode depending on the reactions.

She turned towards the group to get its attention.

"We will now take place in the Coliseum, where you will attend a demonstration of the Indominus feats. During the show, you will be asked to sit down and avoid making as little noise as possible so as to not irritate the animal. Access to the bleachers is after the turn at the end of the corridor."

Dearing invited everyone to follow her and they walked along the gallery before taking a corridor on their left which opened on a room just in front of the access to the bleachers.  
The group climbed a few steps and ended up in the Coliseum itself.

It was a large amphitheatre overlooking an elliptical arena and embellished with a small grove of palm trees, black rocks, including one shaped like a promontory, and skeletons of dinosaurs giving the place an ominous look.  
Only a little more than half of its perimeter was lined with bleachers, a wall of black rocks delimiting the arena on the rest of the perimeter.  
In the centre of the wall, there was a dark tunnel whose entrance was blocked with a portcullis.  
Behind, Mount Sibo was dominating the landscape.  
Above the tunnel, a giant screen showed the bleachers as well as the part of the arena in front of them.

The group walked up to the bleachers in the centre, the only ones being ready.  
The first row of seats being located at the same level as the arena, they were separated from it by a guardrail running along a moat about a dozen meters wide and dug deep enough to prevent the Indominus to go out and reach the audience.  
Just in front of the portcullis, at a spot offering the best view on the arena and overhanging the first row, a box was reserved for VIP visitors.

Dearing took only Masrani and the representatives there, inviting the reporters to take their place among the seats outside.  
Inside the box, the seats were more comfortable and spaced from each other than they were on the bleachers. Masrani sat down in the centre, Dearing to his right and the representatives on the rest of the row.  
While she was on her phone writing a text, the rest of the group took seats on each side of the box and security guards came to took positions behind them, watching the hands of the reporters and making sure that their devices weren't out.

Once the entire group was sit, one of the guards talked in his radio and a few moments later, two large walls on either side of the rock wall slid towards each other while a sliding roof spread over the arena and the bleachers, plunging them gradually into half-light then into darkness.  
Braziers lit up above the tunnel and the audience heard the portcullis being raised while it was eager to see the I. rex but also feared this encounter at the same time.

From the box, Dearing saw the end of a huge maw emerge from the dark tunnel before the braziers suddenly turned off, plunging the arena in total darkness.  
According to the designers of attraction, it helped to appeal to everyone's primal fears, the legacy of a time when Man was just an animal among many, out in the wilderness and vulnerable to predators.  
Dearing's hands clung tightly to the armrest of her seat and she heard some of group's members who, shivering, inhaled faster and faster.  
Wu, who had invited himself inside the box during the closing of the roof, was moving with excitement in his seat, like someone that was going to see his favourite film in a cinema.

Dearing had already attended tests of the same kind in that arena, but each time it was the same thing, the fear that was growing inside her at a high speed and although she kept persuading herself that she was safe, her instincts were telling the opposite and that she had to flee.  
She heard the creature approaching slowly but steadily while a growl was brewing in its body.  
A pungent smell reached the spectators nostrils.  
It was then that a projector was lit and cast the shadow of the Indominus on the audience whose breath was cut off when the creature was revealed to them.

The I. rex was looking towards the box, staring at the people who were sitting there, most notably Dearing who was strongly tempted to turn her gaze away as she always did, not out of mere fear but for more complex reasons.  
When she had looked in her eyes during the first test showing, she had noticed that this animal had something uncanny about her but it was neither the fact she wasn't natural nor a vicious predator with behavioural problems, it was something on which she couldn't put the finger on. But whatever it was, Dearing had no choice to let the Indominus be a part of her journey since the huge part she was going to play in her career.  
 _  
They did their job quite well_ , she thought, _too well though._

* * *

Annotations:

(*) J-SEC: Abbreviation for _Jurassic World Security_ , a branch of InGen's security division whose role is ensuring the safety of the visitors and the employees at Jurassic World. It is the equivalent of a police force on the island.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _Hypothetical Casting:_

 _ **Hiroyuki Sanada** as Katashi Hamada_

 _Hamada is one of the two characters whose physical appearance in this fic differs from the one in the film._  
 _This version of Hamada was originally based on the one from a script extract that was leaked early during the production of Jurassic World. Therefore, I looked for a Japanese actor older than Brian Tee (who portrays Hamada in the Jurassic World film) and ended up imagining Hiroyuki Sanada portraying this character._


	12. The Raptor Whisperer

Under the shade of the foliage, a piglet was running as fast as it could through the tall grasses, squeaking in terror as he was chased by a pack of predators much bigger than it.  
The young pig burst out of the undergrowth and ended up on a surface covered with wood chips which he crossed quickly, heading towards a trapdoor within a wall.  
Its pursuers arrived on the chips in their turn but as they were on the verge to catching up with the piglet, a man's voice stopped them:

"Hold!"

The predators complied reluctantly and growl in frustration, watching the piglet passing the trapdoor which closed just after.  
They were five meters long and one and a half meter high dinosaurs, slender-shaped with a long tail, large hands ended by clawed fingers and an elongated and relatively narrow snout. Most part of their bodies were covered with feathers, leaving only the snout and the feet naked, and each of the individuals had different colours.  
One of the main feature of their species was a large sickle-shaped claw on the second toe. Those animals were part of the _Dromaeosauridae_ family and belonged to the genus _Achillobator_.

"Hey!"

They raised their heads and looked towards the footbridge that passed over this part of the paddock and on which their trainer and keeper stood, a tall and well-built man with long brown hair and whose skin had been tanned by the Costa Rican sun: Owen Grady.

"Eyes on me!"

Three of the animals looked at him.  
The fourth, the largest of the pack and whose plumage had the same hues as the ones of the Peregrine falcon, grey-blue on the back and the arms while the underside was white stained with black, looked elsewhere.  
Grady whistled to catch her attention:

"Blue!"

She finally looked at him.

"Watch it!"

On Blue's right, an individual with green feathers growled at Grady.

"Hey, Charlie!"

Charlie hissed and snapped her jaws.

"Don't give me that shit!" He reprimanded her, in the manner of a father telling his daughter off.

On Blue's left, an _Achillobator_ with brown feathers began to fidget and growl.

"Delta, shut up!"

During all that time, Echo, the individual on Charlie's right, black of feathers with a grey scarred snout, had remained quiet and as soon as Grady had the attention of the entire pack, he pressed on the clicker he was holding in his hand.  
The clicking sound was heard and recognized by the achillobators.

Grady gave a new order:

"Good. And… we're moving!"

He moved a few steps along the footbridge and the dinosaurs followed him.

As they were moving, Charlie inadvertently hit Echo with her tail, and the latter snapped her jaws as a warning.

"Hold!"

The achillobators stopped in unison, forming a V.

"Okay, that's good!" Grady commented, impressed. "Very good!"

He pressed on the clicker and then took several dead rats in a bucket near his feet before calling each of the animals by their names and throwing them a rat that they caught mid-air and swallowed whole.  
Blue's turn came last and Grady took care to show her the reward before throwing it at her:

"Blue. This one is for you."

He waited that the achillobators had finished swallowing their rats before giving them the last order of the session.

"Eyes up!"

They looked up in his direction and Grady raised his right hand high before lowering it, informing them that the training session was over. He watched them running under the footbridge and scattering in the paddock.

Grady had been living on Nublar for over four years and worked at Jurassic World as a park keeper and a trainer.  
Training sessions such as the one he had just performed were the bulk of his work within the IBRIS program (*), whose purpose was to study the intelligence of _Dromaeosauridae_ , more commonly known as raptors.

Prior to working at Jurassic World within this research program, he was part of the US Navy's marine mammal program, based in San Diego, which, as the name implies, aimed to study the military use of marine mammals, mainly Bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions, for mine-sweeping, salvaging or harbour protection against combat divers.  
However, the promising beginnings of robots and underwater drones announced the end of this program, machines being easier to control than animals.  
Thus, from the beginning of 2010, the different teams of the program began to be dissolved one by one and Grady's one was among the first, but it was also at this period that InGen was looking for a trainer for the IBRIS program.  
One day, as he was starting to look for a job in a zoo or an oceanarium, Grady had received a call from Victor Hoskins, director of InGen's security division and lead instigator of the program.  
Searching someone who had been in the military, Hoskins had of course turned to the marine mammal program. Grady had accepted the offer only at the condition that his dolphins were transferred to a sanctuary and after a few phone calls, Hoskins had assured him that he would make sure that it will be done. Shortly after, Grady had moved to Isla Nublar.

Although park management and some aspects of the park itself were open to criticism, Grady greatly enjoyed life on the island. There was everything he needed: The park and the island offered many wonders to contemplate; Burroughs had very good restaurants and entertainments; he lived in a small bungalow on the shores of the Long Lake where he could fish; and among the other people living on the island most of the year, there were a few beautiful ladies that were attracted by him as for them, he had a physique similar to Tarzan or Conan.  
He was fascinated by animals since his earliest childhood, and working with dinosaurs was something he would not have traded for anything in the world, despite the risk that it could sometimes represent as the traces of small scars on his hands or forearms, inflicted by his achillobators when they were little, as well as another, deeper and older, on the cheek and marks that drew an arc of circle on both side of his right forearm, that he got during a serious accident on the first year within the program.

While the achillobators dispersed in the enclosure, the group of people gathered on the walkway that topped the walls of the enclosure applauded. Among them, there were mainly park keepers but also two members of the Grey Guard, recruits, a Costa Rican man and a Chinese woman.

One of the first, a Frenchman of Senegalese origin, Barry Sembène, came to join Grady.

"It seems that we are finally getting results."

"And yet you know them, Barry. They can be just stubborn as mules."

"I started to think that they didn't hired the right guys but damn, they are almost eating in your palm", a loud voice said.

They saw a paunchy man in his fifties advancing towards them from the opposite end of the walkway.

"We were lucky today, Vic. Usually, it doesn't go so well," Grady stated.

The two keepers greeted Hoskins and he asked half-jokingly:

"This is why you send your reports late?"

"We have been very busy," Sembène replied.

"Obviously not so much when you receive your paychecks!" Hoskins teased. "We barely see you on the island. What do you want?" Grady asked.

The three men began to walk along the outer walkway.

"Given the progress that you have made recently, the board and I wish that you do a field test soon," said Hoskins.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Until now we only used these animals for a recreational purpose. We are sitting on a gold mine and Masrani is just making fed, housed and cleaned zoo's stars out of them, spending most of their time lounging while we could use them in other fields like medicine or agribusiness. The board has already thought about a whole bunch of applications but, according to my sources, our competitors as well."

"If they manage to create their own animals," Sembène said.

"It's not a matter of if but of when," the director of the security division retorted. "I remind you that we don't have any more the monopoly on deextinction since the Russians went ahead of us in the cloning of the Woolly mammoth and other species of the ice age; nor even the one on prehistorical animals parks since these same people have opened a safari reserve near Tula. My contacts have told me as well that a dozen of biotech companies are working twice as hard to close their gap and some of them are waiting the slightest misstep on our side to steal our secrets. Wu can take all the measures he want to jealously protect his works but it only needs one simple hacking and we will definitely loose our leadership position and this is why we must consider going ahead."

At the same moment, Grady felt his cell phone vibrate inside one of his trouser pockets.  
It was not uncommon that other park keepers asked for his help and although they sometimes did outside of his working hours, his response was positive in most cases.  
But as he consulted his messaging service, he was surprised by the fact that the text wasn't from any of them but from the park director herself.

He opened it:

 _Hello Owen,_

 _I know we have not spoken for a long time, but I have to see you this evening. It's very important. Where can I find you?  
Answer me as soon as possible please._

 _C.D_

 _Dec 23, 2017 11: 30 am  
From: Claire_

He wondered which reasons would push Dearing to see him within such a short delay.  
Although they worked in the same park, their respective jobs prevented them from often running into each other.

"Owen, are you listening to me?" Hoskins asked, seeing him reading on his screen. "You'll read your girlfriend's notes later."

"Yeah, except it's Dearing. She wants to see me but I don't know why."

Sembène cleared his throat and Hoskins resumed his speech:

"Anyway. When my daughter was a child, I often read her _Alice in Wonderland_. I particularly remember the passage where the Red Queen tells Alice to run while the landscape stayed the same."

"I know what you mean," Grady said. "The Red Queen Hypothesis. One of the core concepts in evolutionary biology. Adapt or disappear…"

"Such is the imperative that rules every living being on Earth as well as ourselves and our civilisation," Hoskins added. "Through these creatures, Nature is giving us a gift that we must take with both hands to ends the evils that plagues our society such as famine or diseases."

"While I am not opposed to the idea of using animals in biomedical research as long as their living conditions are decent, which sadly is not always the case. I don't see the interest of replacing rabbits, monkeys, dogs and cats by prehistoric animals if the experimental conditions remains open to serious criticism," Grady argued.

"Unlike the animals you listed, the dinosaurs we created are patented, we own them and as a result, we can do whatever we want with them without anyone having the power to oppose us," reminded him Hoskins. "Moreover, doing experiments on compys is less shocking for the public opinion than doing those on cats."

"To come back to the raptors, don't tell me that you want to turn them into war dogs?"

"The war dog term is a bit excessive, I prefer the one of biological drones."

Grady sighed and took a defensive stance.

"Don't use that kind of newspeak with me and don't count on us for this. Barry and I don't want you and the board to screw up the results of nearly than three years of work by sending _my_ animals to their death in some shithole in the Middle East."

"And yet if the security division, _my_ division, is financing this research program, it's not out of kindness and you knew it from the start. If this can reassure you, I'm not talking about deploying them in the middle of a battlefield. We both know that modern weaponry will turn them into _KFC_ in less than ten seconds, and this is without mentioning the risk that they might panic and become unpredictable. I'm rather thinking to a use in skirmishes or tracking operations in remote areas. In their cells, there is a hunting instinct, an instinct that could programmed. Look at them!"

Hoskins pointed to the achillobators.

"Less than ninety millions years ago, Nature created these formidable predators. Fast, powerful, cunning, merciless. They will eat guys from helmet to boots in a blink of an eye."

As he spoke, Charlie was rolling on the chips, Echo cleaning her feathers, and Blue and Delta were lying side by side at the eaves of the undergrowth, undermining the weight of Hoskins speech.

"Fundamentally, your animals are just giant birds of prey and falconry is an ancient tradition. I know that you can do it, you did it with dolphins and birds of prey in the past. Why not raptors?"

"Except that training raptors is like training birds of prey larger than any big cats and almost as smart as a dolphin. Raptors are far more dangerous animals than you think," Sembène retorted.

"I have seen raptors in the wild, in the Five Deaths, and yours are far more docile in comparison."

"Don't be mistaken. If you would find yourself alone with them in the jungle, you would take back what you said, believe me," Grady said.

They went down the stairs and Grady headed for the enclosure lock, bounded by two heavy gratings made of reinforced steel and in which were interlocked padlocked doors.

"And if you talk about this project to the UN or the NATO, I fear for you that that they are not going to be thrilled," he added before pulling out a bunch of keys and grabbing the key of the first padlock.

"You know, many general staff are interested in zoology research. Between the study of fish morphology to improve the drones aerodynamics, the venom of African ants to create paralysing ammo, or communication with great apes through sign language in order to prepare us for an eventual alien encounter, examples are many and prehistoric creatures makes no exception. We try to reduce the number of casualties and some think that robotics is the future but I wouldn't be that sure. After all a drone can be hacked by the enemy while a tamed animal will remain loyal to its master", Hoskins argued.

Grady opened the door of the lock, let in Sembène but closed it in front of Hoskins.

"Except that a drone is not going to eat you if you forgot to feed it. Even if government authorities are interested by a using of dinosaurs in the defence area, I doubt that Masrani will agree. You are in a good position to know that he has a word to say about all of InGen's activities and that he mainly uses this place to teach people humility. Well, at least it's what he is pretending because when we see the lifestyle he has, one has the right to have a few doubts concerning the genuineness of the message he wants to convey."

"This makes us at least one subject on which we agree. You're well-grounded enough to doubt that the real goal of the eighth richest man in the world, a man who owns I don't know how many residences, a yacht… and who is so diversified since he is in telecoms, oil, entertainment and so many other fields that he mustn't know exactly what he owns exactly, is to teach us humility. He is just doing the same thing that politicians and all of these Hollywood stars who sponsors this or that action against poverty of famine in the Third World: It's just a communication operation for the good of his image in the eyes of the average person. Personalities like Simon Masrani can be compared to emperors, offering bread and circuses in the form of fast-foods and entertainments to the masses within this new Rome that our modern civilization as well as this park became."

Grady wrote a brief message in response to Dearing's one, and sent it immediately after a brief re-reading, fully aware that the park director hated lateness.

"You think you're isolated on this island lost in the middle of the Pacific with your little bungalow and your garden but no part of this earth is spared by progress and progress always win man."

"Maybe progress should lose for once. It will cost us a lot in the long run," Grady retorted.

Suddenly, they heard someone running on the footing bridge and shouting:

"The pig is loose!"

Grady turned towards the inside of the paddock and saw a blond young man, an intern that was under his supervision, on the footbridge.  
Having seen the piglet lift the trapdoor, he immediately went to get a long pole ended by a noose and lowered it to intercept the fleeing piglet.

"Leon! Pull it out!" Grady shouted, standing behind the second grating like if he was about to enter inside the paddock.

Leon didn't question and lifted the noose just before the piglet passed through but suddenly it squeaked as Echo's jaws caught it in its tracks and Leon was pulled by the pole against the guardrail of the footbridge, then the force at the other end of the pole pulled him so violently that he passed over the guardrail and fell.

Right away, otherwise this meant the death of the young man, Grady opened the door and rushed to stand between Leon and Charlie, who had the end of the pole in her mouth.

While the _Achillobator_ was getting rid of the pole, Blue and Delta quickly got back on their feet and walked towards Leon, looking at him with a great interest while he tried to sit up.  
As of Echo, she had carried the piglet to the undergrowth to eat it there.  
When he almost reached the intern, Grady saw the two grey guards taking position on the footbridge, ready to shoot on the achillobators with electro-shocking ammo.

"Hold your fire! Electric shocks will only irritate them more!" He shouted at them.

He put himself between Leon, who was trying to move back the best he could, and the achillobators. He stick out his chest, spread his arms wide and almost stood on his heels, in order to look bigger and more impressive. He also presented the palms of his hands, an action that momentarily troubled many dinosaurs, including modern-day ostriches.

"Get up, very slowly ... Don't run away, they will catch you before you cross half the distance separating us from the door!" Grady whispered to the intern while keeping his eyes on the predators. "Stay behind my back and keep your calm!"

Leon complied and stayed behind the back of his training supervisor while the achillobators had focused on the latter, looking into his eyes. Blue began to hiss at him like an angry goose.

"Blue! Stay where you are! Stay still!"

But she did not stop and stick out her chest while spreading her arms, arching her neck and trampling on the same spot. On her head, some feathers rose to form a kind of little crown. She was warning her keeper and trying to intimidate him.  
Suddenly she took a step forward and snapped her jaws at Grady.

"Hey! What did I just say?!" He shouted while his heart pounded wildly.

On his left, Delta was advancing, walking slowly.

"Delta, I see you. Back off!"

The brown _Achillobator_ stopped her advance and growled as an answer. Her eyes looked into the terrified ones of Leon.

"If you make eye contact with them, don't turn your eyes away!" Grady told him. Fighting fear, the young man supported the gaze of the predator.

"Okay. I'm going to begin moving back..." Said the keeper, telling Leon to do the same.

As they progressed backwards step by step towards the lock where Sembène stood near the opened door, ready to grab them, Grady kept scanning the three animals.

"Okay. That's good, stay where you are girls!"

On his right, Charlie was advancing stealthily, planning to surprise her keeper.

"Charlie!"

In his back, Leon turned his head and saw that Charlie had stopped. He thought that Grady had managed to calm them down.

"That's good..." said the latter gently, mainly in order to reassure himself.

Behind them, Sembène and Hoskins watched the scene with a stunned look while the guards had still their weapons aimed at the animals.

Grady and Leon continued to retreat, cornered by the achillobators that had started again to move forward, hissing from time to time.  
The two men managed to be within two meters from the door.

"You're almost out of danger but keep facing them! Be very careful when stepping over the threshold. If you fall, we're dead!"

Carefully, Leon passed one leg then the other inside the lock and Sembène pulled him gently further inside to make room for Grady.  
When he crossed the threshold in his turn, Grady waited to have both feet inside the airlock before slowly reaching for the door, already held by Sembène who also watched the animals.  
The eyes of the two keepers suddenly widened at the same time and as if they shared the same mind, they both pushed the door and managed to lock it at the very last moment.  
There was a rather audible clang when Blue hit the door hard at the end of her leap, thinking she could jump on Grady before he could close the door. Delta and Charlie, who had rushed forward as well, abruptly slowed down and they and their sister showed their teeth to the two keepers and the intern.

"You're okay man?" Sembène asked.

In the paddock, the achillobators turned away from the lock, shaking their heads and growling in frustration.

"It was close," Grady replied.

He gave a friendly pat on Sembène's shoulder before turning to Leon, sitting and his back facing the paddock's lock.

"As for you, how many times I repeated to you the safety instructions?" He reprimanded him, raising his voice.

"I'm sorry," said the young man, his eyes fixed on the ground and his face covered with shame.

"Instead of being sorry, look behind you!" Grady told him.

Leon turned and he jumped, surprised by Delta who was looking at him fiercely, her maw ajar and the hands gripping the bars of the grating.  
He got up quickly and moved back a few feet.

"Never turn your back on a predator. It's a sign of weakness for them," Grady said.

When Leon passed by him as he was heading to the exit, he stopped him by grabbing his arm and he warned him:

"The next time you fall, I won't be there to save your ass."

Before he let him go, Grady asked the intern:

"Tell me. Tonight, you will be at the Iguanodon with the other interns?"

"Um… yes. Why?"

"Barry and I will be there too. You will thank us by paying our pints. That will be all for today."

The other park keepers rushed to the entrance of the lock and were relieved to see that Leon and Grady were unharmed.

"You're okay, son?" Hoskins asked to the intern when he came out first.

The young man answered with a nod and an "I think, sir".

As everyone was preparing to leave for the lunch break, Hoskins stood in front of the lock for a few more moments, thinking back to how Grady had been able to prevent the achillobators from tearing them to pieces.  
The trainer was doubtful about being able to conduct a field test, but the head of the security division thought otherwise, and even though Grady still wanted to postpone the deadline, Hoskins could very well force his hand.  
It was not _his_ animals after all, but those of InGen.

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) _Integrated Behaviour Raptor Intelligence Study_

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _Hypothetical Casting :_

 _ **Alexander Dreymon** as Owen Grady_

 _Grady is the second and last character originally created by Jurassic World's screenwriters whose physical appearance differs here significantly from his film counterpart._

 _Please note that I have nothing against Chris Pratt himself. I think he is a good actor and seems to be a cool guy in real life but the thing is that the more I wrote scenes involving Grady and defined his personality in this story, the less I saw Pratt portraying this version of the character. I also wanted to give the character less a "2010's PG-13 action blockbuster main male hero" and more a "wilder" look, along with a more modest background (he was indeed in the US Navy Marine Mammal Program but he never was a Navy Seal before)._

 _Following my casting logics and having watched The Last Kingdom on the meanwhile, I ended up imagining Alexander Dreymon in the role (therefore, for this version of Grady, basically imagine Uthred of Bebbanburg with slightly shorter hair and more muscle)._


	13. Control

Once the test showing was over, Dearing ended the visit of the I. rex Coliseum with a speech in which she thanked the reporters for their coming and invited them to come back for the attraction's inauguration.  
All went back to the Administration with the same modes of transportation than on the outward trip and on the return trip, it was Carl, Masrani's co-pilot, who flew the helicopter.  
He dropped off his passengers at the heliport on the Administration's roof before leaving for the depot while Dearing took Masrani and the representatives to the panoramic restaurant on the top floor of the building.

The latter had a 360-degree view over a large part of the island, as well as the ocean to the east, and with the tables and chairs being on a moving floor, the customers could see the scenery going by during their meal.  
There, they were joined by the park executives and they all dined together in a part of the restaurant that had been reserved for them, away from the visitors and the other employees who were also eating there.  
During the meal, which lasted a good two hours, the representatives gave their impressions on the new attraction: They were won over.

X

After the meal, they were brought to the VIP lounge of the _Lost Valley Palace_ , a hotel perched on top of the foothills south-west of the Lagoon near a pass and one of the most luxurious on the island.  
As its name indicated, the aim of the room was to welcome VIPs such as potential investors or partners but also any celebrity having a stay at Jurassic World, stays that were attested by a panoply of framed photographs hanging on the wall, showing renowned scientists, famous athletes, stars, or influential politicians enjoying the park.  
The style of the salon was colonial, as if it had belonged to some wealthy explorer or big game hunter except that, instead of stuffed animals' busts, replicas of skulls of various prehistoric animals were fixed to the walls. To the northeast, high windows overlooked the Lagoon and Burroughs as well as the water park and the Oceanarium, both extending on the western side of the Lagoon.  
On a long coffee table located between some armchairs and large brown sofas, there was a tray with biscuits and cakes, a cafetiere containing coffee and a carafe containing fruit juice.  
There, the representatives assured Dearing that following their upcoming returns, GBC would most likely be willing to sign a sponsorship contract, and they remained for some time to discuss with the director and the park executives.  
Around three pm, a farewell cocktail was given and the park officials wished the representatives a pleasant end of their stay and a happy festive season.

X

Masrani left soon after, leaving for his residence, and the executives returned to work, with most of them heading back to the Administration.  
Dearing took the direction of the control room, the place from which Jurassic World was monitored and on which depended the proper functioning of the park.

It was a rectangular room, lit laterally by bay windows looking out north and south, separated from the corridor by a thick wall of glass.  
At the back of the room, a giant screen showed a map of the island updated in real time along with other crucial information such as the count of visitors, animals, the location of those, the weather forecast and other statistical data.  
The rows of workstations where the twenty or so technicians were positioned were arranged in stages on an inclined plane, with the gaze of each technician systematically passing over the heads of those on the front row, allowing everyone to have an optimal view of the screen.

Arrived before the door, Dearing slipped her badge into a slot while leaving her fingers on the metallic edge of the card so that the computer can scan her fingerprints.  
There was an electronic beep, the door opened and she entered the room.  
She stopped behind the centre of the back row, at the level of a technician with long curly brown hair to which she asked:

"How many visitors do we have?"

"Twenty-two thousand two hundred and sixteen," answered the technician, a woman named Vivian Krill.

"Any problems?"

"Except six lost kids waiting for their parents, nothing special," replied Lowery Cruthers, the technician sitting to the left of Krill.

Dearing leaned on the metal guardrail separating her from the technicians and stared at Krill's console screen.  
She saw on it CCTV footage from one of Safari Village's cameras. Visitors were cautiously passing by some garbage containers while a park keeper, a net in hand, stood in front of the containers, ready to throw it on the small dinosaurs that were searching among the garbage.

No bigger than a chicken, they had a thin neck and a long tail and they were fiendishly nimble, jumping between the containers or plunging head first into the bins to escape the net.  
Intrigued by the situation, Dearing skirted the railing and came to stand behind Krill.

"What is this bustle?" She asked.

"Feral compys looting garbage cans," replied Krill. "No one was hurt. Once they will be captured, the keepers will put them in the quarantine area before knowing what to do with them."

"We capture one, ten appears. We had been assured that the traps set a few months ago would help us get rid of them and yet it it's the second incident of this type this month. Thank God there are no more feral carnivores bigger than them on this island for years," said Dearing, annoyed.

"On the other hand, we must acknowledge that they are still very useful for the Reserve's Management," Cruthers said. "By this, I mean that they scavenge the corpses, preventing the proliferation of diseases by the occasion and given that we allow our dinosaurs to reproduce in order to give a more authentic experience to the visitors, some species like the yinlongs or the dryosaurs are breeding like rabbits and if the compys were not there to do the job of the _Ornitholestes_ by plundering their nests, these species would proliferate and we would be forced to reduce their populations to acceptable levels with culling operations. However, gunshots would make tourists uncomfortable whatever explanations, thus giving them a wrong image of what we are doing here. So you should rather thank the compys for maintaining us a good image even if it's done at the cost of some looting without serious consequences."

Cruthers pivoted to face Dearing.  
Of an age close to the one of the park director, wearing glasses and frequently humorous t-shirts or ones that called on pop-culture references, just like the one he was wearing that day, depicting a parody version of the evolution of Man, where the last character was sitting, bent over a computer screen.  
Lowery Cruthers was the chief technician of the control room and he was both passionate about his work and very critical, particularly towards the park politics under Dearing's direction.

"You understand that they are living beings, right?" He said with a half-moralizing, half-condescending tone.

Seeing that the technician's elbow was too close from his mug of coffee, Dearing pushed with her foot Cruthers' bin in order to put it under the edge near which was the mug.

"You signed the contract?" Krill asked to Dearing, eager to change the subject and avoid another tiresome debate between the director and the chief technician.

"Not yet. They have to see about it with their board, but I'm confident. GBC will present the I. rex Coliseum," Dearing declared proudly.

Cruthers sighed, shook his head and held back a swear word.

"Here we go again..." the park director sighed.

"I'm sorry but just by hearing you say it, it sounds so stupid. Why not go the distance, Claire, and let these corporations name the dinosaurs. They already have stadiums, why would they stop there? We could have, I don't know, _Pepsisaurus_ or _Totsitodon_ for example. Although, _Pepsisaurus_ does not sound too bad ..." he said while stroking the thinned out edges of his thick moustache.

"Anyway, the people who ran Jurassic Park at the time didn't need that, they had real dinosaurs and not artificial ones. The first park was legit."

"If the folks from the lab could hear you my dear..." Dearing mocked.

"I already have heard their arguments but it doesn't change anything. I mean, the I. rex is not even based on an existing prehistoric animal and therefore she has nothing to do in our park."

He took his mug of coffee and stirred its content a bit.

"Her very existence is beyond belief..." he added before taking a sip.

"Besides this, what makes the first park more legitimate than this one? We are doing exactly the same thing and moreover, about sponsorship, we are far from the only establishment with captive animals to do it," Dearing retorted.

She looked over Cruthers' shoulder and glanced at his desk.  
Dinosaur figurines occupied the edge of his console and on both sides of his keyboard, sheets of paper were piling up in an anarchic manner.  
On the right pile, he had put his mug, at a spot from which it was close from falling.

"Lowery? It could be nice if you clean up your desk for a change," Dearing suggested when she saw its state. "It's not that it's an unspeakable and chaotic mess but quite…"

"But my desk is really fine. I like to think of it as a living system. Just enough stability to prevent it from descending into anarchy…" He said while repositioning his figurines.

However, his elbow hit the mug which fell from the desk to land in the bin, splashing its content.

"Shit!" Cruthers complained in a low voice.

Several of his colleagues restrained themselves to laugh and Dearing just shook her head condescendingly while chuckling inside.

"I should go," she finally said.

She walked out of the room and the technicians saw her taking the stairs leading to the upper floor, where her office was.  
As he turned back to his workstation, one of them saw on his screen that one of the shows was about to begin, one of the most spectacular and popular: The mosasaur feeding show.


	14. The Oceanarium

"The mosasaurs are a group of marine reptiles that appeared in the beginning of the Upper Cretaceous and diversified during the last thirty million years of the age of the dinosaurs, colonizing all the seas and oceans of the globe as well as the great rivers, occupying the ecological niches left vacant since the extinction of the pliosaurs," declared the host of the mosasaur feeding show. "During their evolution, the mosasaurs have grown in size as evidenced by some fossils that suggest a length of seventeen meters long for the larger specimens but our _Mosasaurus_ is an extraordinary specimen: She is nearly twenty two meters long and weighs more than twenty tons."

She had several hundreds of visitors as an audience, sitting in the bleachers of the stadium on the north-western part of the Lagoon, where it opened on a small bay.  
The Mitchells, to whom Zara had arranged to meet after the feeding, had sat at the fourth row, in the middle of the bleachers, to get the best view possible.  
While Gray was listening attentively, Zach seemed more distracted.

"During the Cretaceous, the mosasaur was an apex predator that hunted near the surface of the water," continued the host. "It fed on sea turtles, large fish, other marine reptiles, including other species of mosasaurs, and any other animal that had the misfortune to venture into its territory. Let's see if she's hungry."

At their southern end, the rows of bleachers stopped abruptly by a large and high rock, to which a platform was fixed.  
On it, a bait was being hooked to a cable connected to the top of a pillar rising high above the water surface in the middle of the bay.  
Shortly afterwards, the cable was pulled towards the pillar and the audience noticed that the bait had the shape and the size of a Great white shark but not its colour. Actually, the bait was not a shark but a pile of fish meat carved to look like it. As it slowly moved towards the pillar, blood fell and traced a red trail on the water.

"She is a little shy so be patient," advised the host before turning towards the bay, waiting for the arrival of the mosasaur while the bait hung nine meters above the lagoon.

Gray leaned over his brother's phone and noted that he was staring blankly at a picture of some blonde girl.  
Looking up, he saw a shadow in the water, near the barrier reef opposite of the stadium and by squinting, he saw briefly the top of a caudal fin ripping through the surface before disappearing immediately.

"Zach! The mosasaur!"

He patted his brother's shoulder to get him out of his reverie and Zach finally raised his head.  
However, the surface of the water was still as calm as before from his point of view.

"Look!"

Gray pointed to him the huge dark mass that was approaching, swimming towards the pillar, swimming faster and faster…  
Then the mass went deeper, becoming a vague shadow below the surface before disappearing into the depths.

"I'm lookin…"

But before his older brother had time to finish his sentence, the mosasaur breach from the water, hauling the front half of her barrel-shaped body above the surface, and closed her large jaws on the bait while at once, the audience pointed its cameras, smartphones and touch pads towards the marine reptile.

Like cetaceans, the mosasaur had fins as limbs and a smooth skin, giving the body more hydrodynamism.  
Her colour, of an almost black dark blue on the back and white on the underside, helped her to blend with her environment because seen from above, she was confused with the seabed while seen from below, she was with the surface of the water.

Under the monstrous pressure exerted by the jaws of this Cretaceous Leviathan, the bait was almost cut off instantaneously and her food in the mouth, the mosasaur let the upper part of the body fall back into the water in a surprisingly graceful way for a reptile of her size and which wasn't without recalling those of the Humpback whales, but in doing so, she splashed the first rows of bleachers.  
Some of the visitors shouted when the salty and lukewarm water of the lagoon fell upon them but once the surprise had passed, all applauded, astounded by this encounter with the apex predator of the Cretaceous oceans.

"Holy Shit! It was awesome!" Gray exclaimed after shaking his soaked air.

Zach, wet through, turned to his brother and smiled at him.

"Please stay seated," the host asked to the audience, "the feeding is not over. We will now move closer to the mosasaur."

She joined the bleachers and there was a rumble beneath the audience.  
It felt that under it, the bleachers were going below ground level and momentarily, the lagoon disappeared from their view.

A few seconds later, while the bleachers continued to sink, a large bay window looking out on the bottom of the bay appeared before their eyes and when the upper rows of the bleachers were below the level of the surface of the lagoon, large trapdoors slid horizontally above them, plunging them into the dim light of a long crescent-shaped underground room.  
On the water surface, about twenty meters above the first rows, a sheet of blood appeared and a pile of meat as high as an adult man hit the surface before sinking to the bottom.

Having felt a disturbance in her environment, the mosasaur opened her mouth to let out the end of a forked tongue in the same way as a snake or a varan in order to detect the blood's scent and follow it up to the meat pile that had almost reached the sandy bottom.  
Using her bilobed tail as a propellant, the mosasaur rushed on the red mass and engulfed it in a snap of jaws, just a few meters from the glass in front of an excited audience that applauded again.

"That was awesome!" Zach said to his brother.

The feeding show being over, the host informed the audience that it could get up and take the direction of the exits, located at the extremities of the room, or stay a little bit more to observe the mosasaur. Anyway, all had to leave the bleachers so that those can return above the surface.

They were now in what was called The Depths, a name given to the underground levels of Burroughs and which included underwater viewing galleries around the Lagoon as well as a whole network of technical galleries and service tunnels, stretching under the whole city and its vicinity and accomplishing certain functions essential for the proper functioning of the park.

Young met the brothers at the exit and they resumed their visit, passing in front of the stairs leading to the surface, and continued straight, crossing a long gallery with a subdued light where there was an exhibition dedicated to _Mosasauridae_ family.  
They followed a directional sign reading " _Hell's Aquarium_ " and were skirting the Lagoon from the north and to their left, large round windows looked out on the mosasaur's habitat. The latter occupied an area of four hectares out of the twenty-five of the Lagoon and except at the level of the stadium, it was thirty-five meters deep.  
At the southern end of the lagoon, the Mitchells saw a gigantic shape, as big as a twelve-storey high building and looking like an underwater mountain: Mount Thetis.

Like the fake volcano housing the Discovery Centre, Mount Thetis was artificial in nature and as the heart of the Oceanarium, it also housed rooms across several floors as well as a large hall with two gigantic acrylic panels, among the largest in the world, one looking on the mosasaur lagoon and the other on the Great Western Interior Seaway, the largest and the deepest of all of those of the Lagoon.  
From the surface, one could guess the location of Mount Thetis thanks to the panoramic platform located above its summit and also because it was the point from which the reef barriers delimiting the territories of the various marine species living in the Lagoon.  
Visitors could only reach this place by taking the glass tunnels that crossed most of the lagoons, with the notable exception of the mosasaur's one.  
Built within the reef barrier south-east of Mount Thetis and separating the lagoons of the Great Western Interior Seaway and the Oxford Seas, there was the five-star underwater hotel The Reef, which rooms offered a view on the bottom of the two lagoons and their respective inhabitants.  
In the base of Mount Thetis, there was also the station of one of the most iconic attractions of the Oceanarium: The submarine tour. In it, visitors boarded submarines that followed a track through several of the lagoons, travelling under the seas of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.

X

When the trio finally came back to the surface somewhere near the Aquatic Park, the Sun had begun its descent.  
It was quarter to five past and they had almost finished the visit of the Oceanarium.  
As they emerged in the open air, Zach's phone vibrated in his pocket and when he turned it on, the young man saw a notification informing him that their mother had tried to call them a quarter of an hour earlier, when they were in a place where phones couldn't receive any signal.  
Zach also remembered that he had promised to call her once they arrived at Claire's place, but he had forgotten and that promise had not come to his mind until then.

He called her immediately:

"Hi Mom. I know, I was supposed to call you as soon as we arrived to tell you that the trip went well but I completely forget, excuse me."

" _Hey, Zach. I tried to phone you as soon as I came home from work but you didn't answer._ "

"We were in a tunnel. And I'm not kidding," he added a few seconds later. "There were meters upon meters of water above our heads."

" _Is everything okay at least?_ " She asked.

"Nothing to report."

" _What are you doing?_ "

Not far away, Gray was admiring animals with tapered bodies and long necks, resting at the edge of a pool.

Of a pale yellow colour with dark markings on the back and the size of an alligator, they had short webbed feet, a long flattened tail and jaws filled with sharp needle-like teeth.

"We are in the marine animals' area. In front of me, there are some strange creatures. They look like the product of an orgy between a sea lion, an alligator and a snake," he described.

Zach read the name of the species on the panel affixed to the wall.

"Nothosaurs they're called."

In front of him, there was a bay window looking on the interior of the pool and another of the nothosaurs appeared on his right, sliding elegantly in the water while skimming past the glass.  
It looked curiously at the young man on the phone before turning on itself playfully and continuing to tour its pool.

" _Gray is with you, right? And Claire? I would like to talk to her._ "

Gray had turned away from the nothosaurs and had gone to a sheltered space where there was a tactile pool where from afar, Zach saw the shell of creatures he presumed to be some kind of turtle.

"Gray is right in front of me. As for Claire ... she's in the bathroom," he lied. At the other end of the line, his mother sighed with exasperation.

" _Zach ... you know you're a bad liar, just like your father_."

"Ok, ok. I'm sorry for lying to you," he apologized. "The thing is, she has a lot of work today."

" _Certainly she has… Can you pass me Gray?_ "

"Yeah ... Just wait a minute as I tell him you're on the line."

He took out the phone from his ear and called his brother:

"Gray! There is mom on the phone. Come and say hello!"

"I'm coming ..." Gray replied nonchalantly, as if it bothered him to interrupt his petting of the _Henodus_ (*) just for having a talk with his mother.

He turned away from the pool and went to join his brother who was holding out the phone.

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) A species of placodont and not a turtle as many think despite their similar appearance.


	15. Dearing

Dearing spent the rest of her working day in her office, checking emails and reading reports while listening some Wagner opera.

The park director's office, as well as the control room and the park's executives offices, was located within a tower in the western part of the administrative building, tower which looked like a rock at the top of the Administration's spur from the distance.  
The office was a convex-shaped and rather spacious room, richly furnished with a carpeted floor. Daylight entered there through a window in the wall behind the desk and two bay windows which opened on a balcony.  
Between the two bay windows, facing the entrance door, was the desk, massive and made with a smooth and well-formed wood. Behind, placed against the wall and flanking the window, there were two large bookcases and, in a corner at the opposite side of the room, near the plexiglas panel separating the office from the corridor, were a large sofa and two armchairs, placed around a coffee table.  
Nearby, hung on the northern wall just above a small chest of drawers, was the casting of a _Tyrannosaurus_ skull, embedded in its rock.  
Laying on a corner of the desk, Dearing's phone vibrated and rang.

Dearing lowered the sound of the music, put down the glasses she was wearing when working with a screen or reading near the computer keyboard, got up and grabbed the phone. She saw that the caller was Karen, the mother of Zach and Gray, and picked up the call.  
While keeping the phone on her ear, she began to paces her office barefoot.

"Hi Karen."

" _Hello Claire,_ " Karen said coldly. " _How's it going?_ "

"The boys are having fun and learning a lot of things. Everything is fine," Dearing lied.

At the other end of the line, Karen sighed.

" _How can you be sure of this since you're not with them? Zach spilled it out._ " "Listen. Today I had some very important things to do. Moreover, they are not all alone. I told my assistant to keep an eye on them."

Dearing heard another sigh.

"What?"

" _It was supposed to be a family vacation. You have not seen them for years and you don't even spend time with them!_ "

"You are the one saying this? I remind you that the last time I saw them, it was Scott who took the initiative of inviting me."

Karen did not say anything, as Dearing had just rightfully retorted.

"From tomorrow, I will spend the holidays with them. I promise you."

" _A promise tomorrow is worth a lot less than trying today,_ " Karen declared in a moralistic tone.

Dearing rolled her eyes.

"Fuck ... Now you are using mom's credo…"

Still in the same tone, Karen said:

" _Of course I do. It's a good one, very useful when you have children. You will see when you will have some._ "

"Yeah, if I ever have one someday... I am very demanding concerning the choice of my temporary partners so let's not speak about marriage and children…"

" _You know, you're not some kind of queen or princess from the stories you read when you were younger. You can wait a long time for your fearless and virile knight or adventurer ... Sometimes you have to lower your expectations._ "

"We can see in some cases what happens if one has low expectations…" Dearing replied. "And for God's sake, stop minding about the way I'm leading my life!"

She calmed down.

"That's not all but I have like the biggest theme park in the world to manage. I will call you later this week. Goodbye, Karen."

"Goodbye, Claire."

Dearing hung up and put her cell phone on the desk.  
She took a deep breath and exhaled, exasperated by Karen's moral lessons.  
She walked up to the plexiglas panel and lowered the venetian blinds hung above and on both sides of the door.  
Dearing then went to the piece of furniture under the tyrannosaur's skull and opened one of the drawers to pick out a glass and two ice cubes from a receptacle and when she came back behind her desk, she pulled one of the top drawers and took the grey flask that was inside before pouring its content in the glass with the ice cubes.  
With the glass in her hand, she went to one of the bay window and slid it before stepping on the balcony that run along her office, describing a semicircle, and the extremity near which she ended up was facing the Embrace mountains and Mount Sibo.  
The director undid her bun, letting her hair fall up to her shoulders, and walked along the balcony to the opposite end, enjoying the fresh air while swallowing a sip of rum from time to time.

Below, just above the panoramic restaurant, a path called the Eye described an ellipse in the middle of the green roof and connected the tower to the heliport at the end of the spur.  
Kilometres beyond, the Pacific shone and farther to the East, the sky darkened gradually while the island bathed in the golden light of the early twilight.

Dearing only stopped once she faced Burroughs.  
There she put her glass on the handrail and while contemplating the City and the valley it occupied, she lost herself in her thoughts, thinking back to her journey until then.

Born from the second marriage of her mother, Claire was six years younger than Karen.  
She remembered that Karen had always looked down on her because she was only her half-sister.  
Dearing also liked to think that Karen was jealous of the attention that her mother and step-dad had gave to her and in their youth, the relations between the two were always strained and when they grew up, it didn't change at all as their personalities defined differently.

While Karen had spent her teenage years hanging out with her friends to go clubbing and flirting with boys, it was the opposite for Dearing, who favoured her studies and was more difficult in terms of romantic relationships.  
Although she was very feminine, some said that she had actually the hobbies of a man because, among other things, she had practiced rifle shooting during her high school years and even became the champion of her county, as a trophy proudly standing on top of one of the shelves in her office showed.  
Since her father, an executive in a pharmaceutical company, was making a lot of money, Dearing had been able to study marketing and management in the University of Columbia in New York.  
Once she had finished her studies, she had been hired at the age of twenty four as a management assistant in a park in Florida owned by a renowned theme park company. There, she had distinguished herself by her formidable business sense and her effective marketing strategies. She had even managed to give a second wind to said park, which until then had been losing popularity. It was even said that she had been the real boss and not the director who was a notorious incompetent just good at smiling in front of the press and shaking hands.  
However she had felt aggrieved when after so many years of effort, she had been refused the position of park director but having developed a strong reputation within the theme parks world, fortune had smiled upon her.

After reading an article about the renewed vitality of the park in which Dearing was working, Simon Masrani had contacted the young woman to inform her that the position of park director at Jurassic World was going to be vacant in a few years because of the age of then director and that she could get to know the position by acting as a deputy director until the retirement of the aforementioned director. The only thing she had to do was having an interview at InGen's headquarters in Palo Alto.  
Dearing had been incredibly relieved when she had learned that the latter was successful and she had moved to Isla Nublar in late January 2013.  
As planned, she had worked for more than two years as the deputy director of Jurassic World before being appointed director of the park at the occasion of the park's tenth anniversary in June 2015.  
Shortly after, she had been asked to create an unprecedented attraction whose aim would be to scare young and old and that is how the Indominus project was born, becoming Dearing's first big project and the one that was going to become the spearhead of her career.  
In a few years, she could see herself get promoted and taking the helm of InGen's destinations division and even, if the opportunity arose, integrate the company's board of directors.

But in the meantime, a long and arduous road was facing her. She had to take in consideration not only Masrani, but also the Costa Rican government, the United Nations, which each year sent a representative to inspect the park, and specifically to InGen's top executives, her ruthless superiors.  
Although she was respected by all employees, her relationships with some of them were far from ideal because of her character which, on one side, was passionate, voluptuous and frank, and on the other severe, proud, implacable and sometimes unforgiving and arrogant did not help her to be loved by all.  
While walking in one of the corridors of the Administration shortly after her taking office, Dearing had heard the following exchange between two employees and which summed up how she was perceived in general:

"Hey, what do you think of the new director?" One had asked to the other.

"She scares me...," the other had answered in a fearful voice.

"She turns me on," the first had stated.

A number of employees, Cruthers in particular but also the most senior ones, reproached her for moving away from John Hammond's vision and turning Isla Nublar in some kind of a new Dubai sold to multinationals.  
As for the Grey Guard officers, they did not like her very much, finding her attitude regarding security too confident and arrogant. Among other things, from their point of view, she was delaying the administrative procedures for bringing to the island military vehicles and equipment while she considered unnecessary the building of large security bunkers intended to shelter all of the people on the island in the event of a major disaster, some rooms within the Depths being able to perform this role in the worst-case scenario according to her.

But her main opponent was none other than Henry Wu.  
Like her, Wu was an ambitious person trying to moving up along InGen's ladder and the two did not really liked each other, especially since she was appointed park director.  
Not hesitating hurling barbs or barely subtle mockeries every time they were attending a same meeting behind the scenes, they pretended in public to have cordial relations, just like earlier during the press conference.  
Many thought that it was a miracle that the development of the Indominus was successful given the strong involvement of the two rivals in the project.

Once Dearing had finished her drink, she came back inside to put it on the table.  
Wondering if she had received texts since the call of her half-sister, she picked up her phone and as she scanned her texts, she came across the one Grady had sent her earlier:

 _Hi,_

 _I'll be at the Iguanodon by 8._ _  
_ _Hoping it's nothing too bad._

 _O.G_

 _23 Dec 2017 11: 47 am_  
 _From: Owen_


	16. Tea

Before leaving the Palace's VIP lounge, Masrani had invited Wu to come later at his residence so they can have tea together, like they had many times in the past and as expected, Wu arrived at Masrani's residence a few minutes before five o'clock.

Masrani's personal residence on Isla Nublar was a hacienda nestled in a grove of palm trees on a hilltop on the northern slopes of the Southern Plateau, in the heart of the island.

As the two men walked together along a path lined with tropical flowers and which skirted the residence to join the patio, Masrani asked his friend how the conference went.

"Very well," the geneticist replied. "Although genetic hybridization is a new field, they broadly understood how it works. There were only the details that could have been a problem, but years of doing science popularization and teaching at Stanford helped me a lot. They liked a lot the video with this good old Mr. DNA."

"I would have to look at it once it will be online. Honestly, aside that journalist who wanted to take pictures on the sly, everything went well, although the construction delays and the I. rex behaviour problems worried me in the first place but Claire will solve these issues and I remain confident. The first reactions after the test showing are very encouraging and concerning the Indominus itself, I will only say one word: Splendid! A true demon of the Ancient World. Frankly, I congratulate you, you surpassed yourself in making this animal."

"Thank you. I'm glad that she pleases you."

"The sensations I experienced in the Coliseum were indescribable. It was like watching a horror movie except that the monster is real and is aware of the existence of the audience," described Masrani. "Just to think again about it, I have chills. Did you see Claire's face? She was petrified."

"Hardly surprising…," Wu commented with disdain in a low voice.

They reached the patio, built on the hillside.  
From its location, the residence overlooked the sparkling waters of the Long Lake in the north, upstream of the gorges that the helicopter had flew over earlier, and from the patio, one could easily observe the dinosaurs on the northern shores, in the middle of a panorama sweeping a large part of the island's interior, from the Misty Mounts in the east to the Western Cordillera and comprising the area around the Cartago Aviary, the Central Fields and the jungle around the Dreadful Lake that was located south-west of the Embrace, which southern mountainous arch faced them, concealing only the lower half of Mount Sibo.

They passed by a swimming pool and the deckchairs near its edge, and the two climbed a staircase with large stone steps and entered the open veranda that overlooked the pool and where was a long table made of tropical wood.  
Masrani invited the geneticist to sit on one of the rattan chairs placed around the table before taking the chair opposite to him.  
Wu removed his sun glasses from the collar of his T-shirt and put them on the table.

"As for the representatives, they were won over and so we have our sponsor."

A housemaid appeared from the interior of the manor, carrying a silver tray.  
She put the tray on the table, revealing to Wu a tea set in porcelain and a plate containing scones.  
She poured tea in two cups, put each one of them on a saucer and served the two men.  
Masrani thanked her with a nod.

"I will take care of the rest," he said, giving her a smile while he removed the plate of scones from the tray.

"As you wish, sir," the housemaid replied respectfully before turning her heels and going back inside.

Masrani took his cup and carried it to his mouth, blowing on the amber-coloured liquid in order to cool it before swallowing a sip.

"Please, treat yourself!" He said, pointing at the scones.

Wu took a scone and placed it next to his cup.  
He seized the latter and leaned his nose to smell its content.

"Jasmine? I love jasmine tea."

"Yes. It was elaborated with leaves from plants grown on this island," Masrani told him.

They remained silent a few seconds before Wu spoke again.

"I would like to take this occasion to talk about the new versions."

At the pronunciation of the word version, Masrani frowned and began to stroke his beard.

"You want to replace the animals?" He asked.

"Not all of them, only the first species that we cloned," Wu clarified.

"Why, what's wrong with them?"

"Nothing, aside from the fact that they don't look like real prehistoric animals."

Wu's answer left Masrani doubtful.

"What do you mean? These animals are the same that you created for the Jurassic Park project and if I recall correctly, Hammond asked you to create real prehistoric animals and that's what you did."

"I know but my work at the time used the then palaeontological knowledge in order to make our dinosaurs. They were consistent with the depictions of the late eighties and the early nineties, depictions which aren't accurate anymore, pushing many palaeontologists to complain about this, including some of our consultants."

"But the visitors like these animals the way they are."

"I don't deny it. Let's take the example of peplums, a movie genre with which I grew up as I was fascinated by myths in my youth. A lot of people like this kind of movies which unfortunately show to the audiences a fantasy version of the Ancient World, incorrect even, and we are doing the same thing here with Prehistory. As we speak, the entire world as seen our animals, in flesh or through a screen and the majority of the visitors really think that they are exactly the same as those which went extinct millions of years ago despite the given explanations."

"Remember that the first feathered dinosaurs you created were unconvincing in the eyes of the test audience, the investors and myself. Besides, you preferred to stick to the old versions on your own initiative."

"But since, we had been able to get almost pure genomes and the obtained clones are way more convincing on an aesthetic standpoint. And this is without mentioning the fact that some species recently added to the park's collection are feathered but visually attractive and liked by the visitors."

"Indeed. Actually, I am not against populating this park with new and more scientifically accurate versions but only if they are more attracting for the visitors than the previous ones. You know very well that the purpose of this park is to entertain people and that entertainment is the antithesis of reality."

"Sure, but by resting on this postulate, aren't we drifting from John's vision? In his vision of Jurassic Park, John wanted to combine entertainment and pedagogy. For him, these concepts weren't necessarily incompatible. If I remember correctly, you agreed with this vision when I met you for the first time twenty years ago."

"Yes but the realities of this world have pushed us to set aside a part of John's original vision. Since, we had to consider the investors' demands and the visitors' wishes. If we had ignored the two, we wouldn't have gone so far and this place wouldn't be what it is today. And even if we stick to this original vision, what would have been the place of the Indominus, of which you are yet, rightfully, proud and which is compatible only with the entertainment side."

"I am proud of her because she is an unprecedented scientific breakthrough. She wouldn't have her place within John's vision but I couldn't let such an innovation opportunity slip through my fingers," Wu admitted.

"In the file you sent to me, you propose to replace the tyrannosaur by a younger individual of a new version."

"Indeed. Roberta, that's her name, turned twenty-seven this year. According to recent studies, this age is no longer considered as old but median. However, Roberta isn't an individual brought back from the Cretaceous with a time machine but a clone and since she belongs to our first generations of dinosaurs, she suffers from an accelerated aging, which means that she currently has the physical condition of an elderly individual. She is healthy, be assured of that, and animals that are well fed and treated in captivity tend to live longer than wild individuals but we must think about providing her a successor and as soon as possible if we want it to be fully grown and ready to be shown when she will pass away."

"The problem is that I fear backlash from the public," Masrani said. "I doubt that they will like to see the T. rex being reduced to some kind of big colourful fluffy bird, very far from the image of the reptilian apex predator deeply rooted in our collective imagination. A new tyrannosaur shall replace her but it will be an individual of the same version. You really seem to want that the animals to be like their extinct counterparts but there might be the possibility that modern depictions of dinosaurs will become obsolete in their turn because of new discoveries. We may come closer to reality but it is just a distant mirage that we will never reach."

"I'm conscious that we didn't recreated the past. It is definitely gone and it's impossible to do so but the best we can do is to try to recreate it or at least a certain vision of it, even if our creations aren't actual prehistoric animals," the geneticist conceded.

"Ah, Henry… All of this doesn't matter this much and I think you're underestimating your achievements my dear. Since more than twelve years, millions of people have come from the entire world to admire your creations and to get away in this paradise the time of a few days to forget their bland everyday life and the misfortunes of this world. It won't close tomorrow, believe me. Just from an economic point of view, Jurassic World brings astronomical amounts each year to Costa Rica through the benefits of tourism. As President Monge said at the inauguration " _Dinosaurs are a chance for Costa Rica._ " The dream of John Hammond has been accomplished and he would have been really proud of what we built in his honour."

"I think so too," Wu agreed though his voice lacked some conviction.  
 _  
A big colourful fluffy bird? So, it is how Masrani envisions an eventual feathered tyrannosaur? What a cliché vision._ He thought.

Obviously the billionaire didn't want to hear anything about it and was blinded by nostalgia. He didn't seem to understand that adding feathers to a dinosaur wouldn't necessarily turn it into a colourful animal.  
Moreover, a study had shown that _Microraptor_ , a small species of Chinese _Dromaeosauridae_ from the Early Cretaceous, had black feathers and one only need to have a look on modern predatory birds to see that most of them are far from being colourful animals.  
Admittedly, a bird of prey isn't particularly scary for an adult human because it isn't a threat to him or her but for a vole for example, it must be a terrifying monster.

Masrani was far from being the only one being reluctant on the idea and his opinion was even shared by several geneticists of the company, even though, according to Wu, apathy was a factor to take into consideration since it was easier to fill the gaps within paleo DNA, even if it meant producing a clone that barely looked like the original animal, than to try to obtain a paleo DNA with a minimum of gaps.

Henry Wu wasn't fond of resting on his laurels and it was already the case in high school where he had broken his back to obtain the best grades possible, in the hope to integrate a prestigious university. His hard work had been rewarded since he had entered in the University of Stanford where he studied and prepared his doctorate under the guidance of Doctor Norman Atherton, an eminent researcher of the genetics department after whom the laboratories of the Discovery Centre were named.

At the time, the whole staff of the laboratory knew that Atherton was working with a man named John Hammond, apparently the CEO of a recently established genetic engineering company, but no one knew the true purpose of this collaboration.  
Atherton's death in 1984 had created a strong feeling of uncertainty among the department and some had feared for their career's future.  
Two weeks after his funerals, Hammond had approached Wu to make him an offer which was going to change his life forever.  
Indeed, if the Scottish businessman had come to the young doctoral student, the one that Atherton had considered as the best element of Stanford's genetic department, it had been to propose him to become the lead geneticist of the Jurassic Park project.

Shortly after, Wu had left California for a place codenamed _Site B_ , located on a remote island called Isla Sorna, an island that InGen had leased from the Costa Rican government two years earlier.  
During the two following years, Wu and his team had worked tirelessly with paleo DNA contained in the stomach of mosquitoes trapped in amber in order to clone a dinosaur. They had managed to hatch one at the beginning of the year 1986 but the hatchling died a few hours later and the whole team had been saddened, especially Hammond who had made the trip from Palo Alto just to witness the first birth of a non-avian dinosaur since the end of the Cretaceous period. Wu had expected this because it was the first time they brought an extinct species back to life and until then, the majority of the embryos didn't even reach the end of their development and after a while, he had stopped to count the clones thrown into the incinerator.  
A lot of trials had been conducted in Site B to refine the cloning process and obtain healthy individuals and the first dinosaur that survived more than six months hatched in December 1986.  
During the late eighties and the early nineties, Site B was at full capacity and InGen's geneticists succeed in cloning more than thirty animal species from the Mesozoic era. Shortly before Hurricane Clarissa hit Isla Sorna, there were several hundred dinosaurs, adult and juveniles, living in Site B's facilities.

When the construction work at Jurassic Park was sufficiently advanced, Wu had been transferred to Isla Nublar where he worked until June 1993 in the Visitor Centre's lab, whose purpose would have been to act as a display for the visitors but also as an annex for Site B since some dinosaurs hatched directly on Nublar instead of being shipped from Sorna.

The incident at Jurassic Park and the ravages of Hurricane Clarissa on Isla Sorna put InGen in a deep financial crisis but while " _Spare no expense_ " was a credo dear to Hammond, it wasn't the case for Peter Ludlow, his nephew, and InGen's board of directors. Making the old John a scapegoat for all of the misfortunes of the company, they sought to oust him and as time passed, Hammond gradually lost the control of his own company and the most important decisions were made by Ludlow.  
To help InGen getting out of its crisis, Ludlow ordered the setting up of an expedition which was sent in the ruins of Jurassic Park in November 1994.

Although the official aim had been to clean the facilities and retrieve any kind of expensive asset and more particularly the one from the laboratory, the true purpose of this expedition had been to determine the reasons behind the failure of the lysine solution and the "illicit" breeding of the dinosaurs and this is why Ludlow had put Wu at the helm of this expedition. But the endeavour had turned into a disaster and the survivors had been forced to leave the island. Following this, the scientist had been through a dry period, filled with the frustration of not being able to publish his work concerning the cloning of extinct species since InGen wanted to keep the secret about what Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna contained at all costs.

However, fortune had smiled upon him when he presented _Karacosis Wutanensis_ , Wu's flower, during a congress in May 1997. It was the first species of plant entirely man-made with the genome of several different organisms and this achievement brought the attention of Medias from the all across the globe on Henry Wu and InGen. It had helped to reinvigorate Simon Masrani's interest in the company of his father's friend and the young captain of industry he was had offered to Peter Ludlow to buy InGen in order to resolve the company's financial crisis but Hammond's nephew had refused.  
Then the San Diego incident happened less than a week after the congress and InGen's economic situation worsened.

The secrecy surrounding InGen's actions off the coast of Costa Rica being no longer, Wu had been finally allowed to publish his work and soon he became a celebrity and a miracles maker in the eyes of ordinary people. Representatives of other genetic engineering companies began to court him, trying to persuade him to leave a doomed company but in the meantime, InGen's board of directors had reconsidered Masrani's offer.  
Masrani had met Wu at John Hammond's funerals, which took place during the winter of the year 1998 in the home town of InGen's founder in Scotland. He had approached the scientist while he was throwing pebbles into the cold water of a nearby Loch.  
They had discussed their relationship with the deceased and Masrani invited Wu to go have a whisky at a local pub, _The White Dragon_.  
There, he had showed him the will that Hammond had written just before his death and in which he charged Simon Masrani to revive the Jurassic Park project.  
Like many, Wu had thought that Hammond had abandoned his dream of a dinosaur park since the 1993 incident and the fact that he had wanted someone else to fulfil his dream when he was fiercely opposed to any form of exploitation of the dinosaurs during the rest of his life surprised the geneticist.  
Even though the circumstances of this meeting and the nature of the offer had a troubling feeling of déjà vu, Wu had let himself be charmed by Masrani's dedication and passion for the project and a friendship began to form between the two men, united by the loss of a common paternal figure.

Henry Wu could have just doing the same thing as before but for him, innovation was much more than a vague objective that it wasn't necessary to reach to live well, no, it was a real quest.  
He didn't care about money while being invited to give talks or lectures in the world's most prestigious universities or appearing in the cover of _Scientific American_ , was only a moderate source of pleasure.  
He just wanted to push the frontiers of genetics, even if it meant to come dangerously close to the boundaries delimited by ethics.  
But since he had been a young doctorate student working for an old eccentric Scottish man in a laboratory on an island lost in the middle of the ocean, he had let his achievements get to his head as he gained more and more fame until he became one of the most famous scientists on the planet next to Stephen Hawking or Neil De GrasseTyson and it was from that moment that he had begun to feed another kind of ambition.

In a way, Wu considered himself as being the true heir of John Hammond and therefore, he had thought that the position of CEO was rightfully his and when Arnold Mountbatten, Jurassic World's former park director, had been close to the age of retirement, he had begun to covet his post because it would have served him as a springboard to reach the top of InGen's hierarchy and given his friendship with Simon Masrani, he had been convinced that it would be quite easy.  
But the appointment of a young executive coming from Florida named Claire Dearing in the position of deputy director had put a stop to his ambitions and when he had learned that it was Masrani himself that more or less had suggested her to InGen's top executives, he had felt betrayed.  
He had the impression that Masrani had seen through him and consequently preferred to place someone more easily influenced at the helm of Jurassic World than a more experienced employee who had spent all his professional life in InGen and who, above all, would have been less inclined to satisfy the slightest whim of the Indian billionaire. However, Wu knew that a deterioration of his relationship with Masrani would have been against his interest and he had decided despite this to preserve their friendship.

"Look at this beautiful sunset and these herds grazing peacefully!" Masrani said as he looked the landscape. "It reminds me of the vacations I spent in Kenya with my father more than forty years ago. It was during these vacations that we met John," he added, nostalgic. "At the very beginning of the millennium, no one could have imagined than Isla Nublar would became again a safe place to visit with family."

At the mention of that time, Wu began to recall some dark memories that he quickly chased from his mind by looking away towards the lake shores where the dinosaurs seemed to had a peaceful life.

"Life is good, Henry, so just relax and let's drink to John's memory, the prosperity of this park and the future success of the Indominus!"

Thereupon, they toasted and drank the contents of the cups while the island began to be lulled by the songs of the sauropods and the hadrosaurs, as melodious and pleasing to the human ear as those of whales.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _Even though if characters like Arnold Mountbatten are only mentioned and doesn't appear at all in this story, some readers might like to associate a face to the name and just like for other OC's, I will tell who I imagine playing them and in the case of the former park director of Jurassic World, it's an aged **Mark Addy**._


	17. Too old, too slow

The howler monkeys had returned to the bottom of the volcanic cirque that made up the enclosure of the Indominus. Taking advantage of the fact that the beast was sleeping in her lair, they came to feed there on leaves before returning to their nests outside for the night.  
An old male had climbed down to ground level, moving away from the other individuals in order to eat without being disturbed by them.

His hearing having begun to decline lately, he did not hear the other members of the troop leaving by jumping from branches to branches, moving towards the rim of the enclosure.  
Noticing that daylight was rapidly declining, he also began to move out.  
Reaching the foot of the nearest trunk, he climbed slowly towards the crown and once he was close to it, he hold on to the next branch and started to move along it up to its end.  
But when he got there, he stomped on the spot, hesitating to jump to the nearest tree.  
He then turned back and headed for another branch, longer and therefore closer to the other tree.  
Suddenly, darkness fell upon the undergrowth.  
Something had put itself between the last rays of the sun and the monkey, something big...

The old monkey turned his head, looking for the origin of this, and saw it, a few meters from him, this gigantic shape with a scaly skin ... This shape that was watching him, half hidden behind the foliage.  
He cry out in fear and ran away, running along the branch while the surrounding trees were shaking.

When he was about to jump, the monkey froze and a death rattle came out of his mouth as something sharp was running through his body.  
His vision became blurred, then nothingness came...


	18. Night Life

The tines of the fork speared the tender flesh of a piece of steak before lifting it gracefully towards an open mouth.  
Dearing started to chew her piece of meat and despite the fact it was bathed in the sauce, she felt a slight aftertaste of blood, which didn't bother her too much since she liked her meat to be rare.

It was past six o'clock and night had fallen.  
The park director had taken her nephews to dinner at _Winston's_ , a steakhouse on the corner between Richard Owen Avenue and the Obelisk Plaza.  
As soon as they had received their plates, the hungry boys began to eat while Dearing, sitting in front of them, swallowed from time to time a sip of red wine.

"You didn't told me about your day. How was it?" She asked them.

"It was fun. We went to the Discovery Centre, the Zoo and the Oceanarium," Zach told her. "The _Monasaurus_ was badass."

" _Mosasaurus_ ," his brother corrected.

"Was Zara nice with you?"

"She was," the elder answered in a neutral tone.

"Well, she was always on her phone..." Gray said.

Dearing raised an eyebrow.

"She was watching you, at least?" She questioned them with a slight hint of concern.

"Miss Young was doing both at the same time," Zach explained.

A few minutes later, Gray put his cutlery on his plate.

"I have to go to the bathroom," he said.

He got up and under the gaze of his aunt, he took the direction of the toilets at the back of the restaurant.

"Your mother called me today," she told Zach.

"I know. I hope she wasn't too annoying. Sorry, I failed to cover you."

Dearing shrugged.

"It doesn't matter... She would have realized it anyway."

She turned her head towards the toilets and asked:

"Tell me, I wouldn't like to sounds hurtful but Gray isn't a bit weird sometimes?"

"Don't take it wrong if he is distant with you, he is too gentle to do that out of pure contempt or ill-will. It's just that he's a lot of difficulties in breaking the ice with people he doesn't know and it had always been like that," Zach explained to her. "Spend some time with him and it should work out, it will be good for both of you."

Gray came out of the bathroom, joined them and they finished their meal quietly.

Once Dearing had paid the bill, they got up and went out of _Winston's_.

"Gray?" Dearing asked when they were on the doorstep.

"Yes, Aunt Claire?"

"I must tell you that I have to see someone at eight, but I won't be long and that's why I'm asking you if you want to do something in particular tonight. We could go to the cinema watch the last _Star Wars_ , what do you say?"

"Not tonight, I'm tired," Gray replied.

"No problem. And you, Zach?"

"I don't know. Is there some cool bars here?"

"Yes and several but the best for young people is the Merry Iguanodon on the eastern promenade, halfway between the fountain at the other end of the avenue and the crossroads at the base of the hill. The drinks are not expensive and there is quite a bit of life."

"I think I'll have a walk first before going there maybe."

"Very well. We may bump into each other because I will have to meet a colleague of mine there. You have your badge?"

Zach checked his trouser pocket and felt that the _Employee Relative_ badge he had been given earlier in the day was still there.

"Yes."

"You know the way to the house. In case I don't see you tonight, I wish you a good evening. And don't do anything stupid!"

Thereupon, they parted and as Dearing and Gray were returning to a parking lot behind the buildings, Zach stepped onto the Obelisk Plaza.  
As he had noticed when they leaved the Centre to go to the Zoo in the morning, a Christmas tree stood near the entrance to the Western Residential District, a singular object in the middle of a dinosaur park located in a tropical country but actually quite appropriate given the time of the year.

Since nightfall and the closure of the Discovery Centre and the areas of the park housing animals, the plaza was gradually depopulated until there were only a few people sitting here and there on the steps in front of the door of the Centre or near the fountains. On the other hand, Richard Owen Avenue and the Promenade were still very frequented, with groups coming and going on the streets lit by rows of braziers.

As the young man wandered, he looked up at the sky and noticed that the stars were very bright. Jurassic World being located in the middle of the ocean, far from the big metropolises, and the fact that there were only relatively few artificial lights, light pollution on Isla Nublar was low and one could even distinguish the purple mass that was the Milky Way in the night sky.  
Passing near the obelisk, he glanced at the statues of giraffatitans and saw the flames of braziers dancing between their legs, casting their large shadows on the Centre's facade.

Zach walked down the path leading to the pond located between the Centre and the hill of the Grand Nublarian.  
At its end, there was a small kiosk in front of which he passed to follow a downhill path that gently sloped down towards a long stone bridge crossing the pond, dividing it into two parts of unequal size, with the smaller one in the south.  
A quay stretched along its edge and was lined with a few shops, just under the lush terraces set up under the shade of trees and lit by lanterns and torches. Visitors were dining or drinking there, as the terraces were part of the restaurants and bars of the Avenue and the Promenade.  
On the opposite side of the pond, Zach saw the bleachers built on the hillside and looking towards the Discovery Centre and the dome of the IMAX theatre, hidden from the Obelisk Square and depicting the Earth at the end of the Jurassic.

As he was walking on the bridge, Zach noted that the tram track was passing in the middle of the path and further ahead, beyond the other end of the bridge and on a promenade embellished with palm trees running along the base of the hill of the Grand Nublarian and its lush terraces, gardens and patios that were reminiscent of the hanging gardens of ancient Babylon, he saw a team of two mantellisaurs stopped between the Ray Harryhausen Multiplex Cinema and the Casino, both built within the hill and under the hotel.

Unlike the IMAX Theatre of the Discovery Centre, which only screened documentaries, the Harryhausen Multiplex included in its programme the same films as those in most cinemas around the world (or The Outside World, as the employees living on the island most of the year said amusedly).  
Given its location on a highly touristic island populated by prehistoric animals, premieres of dinosaur-related films, including the 2005 King Kong remake and two works inspired by the incidents of 1993 and 1997, took place at this cinema.  
On several occasions, teams of filmmakers visited Jurassic World so that sound effects specialists could record the sounds of the species housed in the park and add them to their sound banks.

Zach began to hear the muffled sound of the music of a nightclub, the _Chicxulub_ , also located under the gardens and within the hill, and he reached the end of the bridge before heading south, towards the crossroads mentioned by Claire and which they took at the very beginning of their visit.

Once there, he turned right, returning towards Richard Owen Avenue, and looked between the arcades in order to catch the sight of a tavern's lights. As he was walking along them, he began to hear music as well as the noises produced by a large number of discussions to which were mixed a few laughs.  
Halfway, as his aunt had indicated, he saw the sign of the Merry Iguanodon.

Grating slightly because of the wind and hung by short chains to an iron bar fixed horizontally to the upper part of the arcade located just under the first floor, it depicted an _Iguanodon_ with anthropomorphic features, drunk and holding in its right hand a pint of foaming beer.  
The young man went under the porch and pushed the door, entering into the tavern.

As he moved further inside, he was struck by the stifling heat that reigned there.  
In the large rectangular room that was the main room and the two mezzanines overhanging it, customers chatted and drank while right of Zach, a rock band was performing on a stage, above which was the gigantic and horned skull of a _Pentaceratops_.  
He noticed that the capital of each of the columns on either side of the room and supporting the first mezzanine were carved in the shape of iguanodons heads, whose profile evoked from afar the one of a horse.  
Round tables and high bar tables were placed here and there around the dance floor in front of the stage, while the spans behind the columns also had long banquet tables.

Zach took the direction of the bar, located opposite of the stage, and made his way through the mass of customers before he could be within earshot of the bartender. He ordered a cocktail and went to sit at one of the high bar tables.  
As the musicians continued to play, he took out his cell phone and noticed that he had received messages from his high school friends, who were asking him how his holidays were going. He texted for a long time with one of his classmates but when we wanted to put down his phone after the conversation, he could not help but open his photo gallery and search there the same picture he was contemplating during the mosasaur feeding, the one of the blonde girl.  
He gazed at her melancholically for a long moment before being pulled out of his reverie by a familiar voice:

"It's your girlfriend?"

Zach glanced over his shoulder and saw that Young was standing behind him, a glass of Mojito in her hand.

"Yes, or rather she was," he replied bitterly. "Given the amount of people on this island, I did not expect to meet you here Miss Young."

"Please, call me Zara. Since you are here, I would like to apologise for my cold and indifferent behaviour today with you and your brother," she said, leaning an elbow on the high bar table. "It's just it's not supposed to be my job."

"Don't worry, I understand. If I had been in your place, doing this would had also annoyed me. I mean, why Claire asked you to act as some kind of babysitter for us? Even Gray is too old to have one."

"Maybe she still sees you as children. The last time you saw her, it was ten years ago, right?"

"Yes. She had come to Aspen for skiing holidays with us. It was my father who took the initiative to invite Claire. He wanted her to spend some time with us."

"Sorry if I'm indiscreet but how things are going with your brother?"

"Not too bad. We're not the best pals but it could be worse and the fact that each one of us live with a different parent doesn't help. He lives with my mother and I live with my father and his girlfriend."

"So your parents are divorced?"

"Yeah, it'll be two years soon."

"Zara!" Someone shouted.

The Irishwoman turned around and saw Cruthers and Krill sitting at a table near the windows looking on the Promenade.

"I'm coming!" She told them. "Do you want to sit with us?" She asked Zach.

"Yes, why not?"

The two left the high bar table and headed towards the technicians.

Along the way, they passed by a group of young people, some interns.  
One of them, a blond with medium long hair was telling a misfortune that he had experienced the same day:

"... and then, the _Achillobator_ approached me, growling and hissing. I was on the verge of pissing myself."

"What a loser!" Another intern taunted him. "You didn't have to try saving Piglet!" She added.

Leon suddenly felt someone behind him patting his shoulder.

"Hey, aren't you forgetting something?" Sembène's voice asked.

"Ah, shit ..." said Leon, turning around.

"Come on! _Hop, hop!_ And don't forget that you have two beers to pay!" The French park keeper reminded him by showing his thumb and his forefinger spread.

With a frowned face, Leon got up and headed for the bar.

"Someone needs to add in the dictionary the word intern as a synonym of slave…," he mumbled on the way.

As agreed, he ordered two pints of beer and as soon as they were ready, he paid for them with his own money and brought them to his internship supervisors, making his way through the customers.  
Grady and Sembène were sitting by a small table between the bar and the high bar tables, and when they saw with satisfaction the young man bringing to them the amber drinks.

"Perfect! We thank you, Leon. It's all settled up, now," Grady said. "Have a nice evening."

"Nice evening to you too," he wished to them.

Leon took leave of the two men and returned to the other interns.  
Grady and Sembène toasted.

"Don't you think we're kinda acting like dicks with him?" Sembène asked jokingly.

"Oh, this trains him!" Grady said casually before swallowing a sip of beer. "When we were about his age, we took stronger hits for the same kind of screw-ups."

"At which time she is supposed to come?"

Grady, having arranged to meet Dearing at eight o'clock, the same time at which he and Sembène used to go the tavern, looked at his watch.

"Seven fifty-eight," he read.

By scanning the room, Sembène spotted Dearing's assistant as well as Lowery Cruthers and Vivian Krill sitting at a table near the windows looking on the Promenade and he noted that a teenager unknown to him was sitting with them.

"What did you do for her wanting to see you under such brief delays?" He asked his colleague.

"But nothing!" He grumbled.

"Given her message, it seemed urgent."

Sembène paused and then said:

"And that's where she tells you that you're a dad..."

The beer that Grady was swallowing nearly went the wrong way and he almost spit everything out in his pint.

"What you are saying doesn't make any sense!" He exclaimed. "It's been almost three years that I didn't get in on with her. Even in the unlikely event that I accidentally sprayed her eggs, I think that it would have been known and she would have told me. Moreover, a round belly is hard to hide with the local climate and I didn't heard she had gone on an extended leave."

"You know better than me how much our dear director can be determined. She would be the kind to give birth in the middle of a battlefield while keeping a weapon in hand! One of her business trips lasted a little more than three weeks, and in the case of some women, one barely see the evidences of a pregnancy," Sembène reminded him with a falsely serious look on his face. "From this, some assumptions can be made and given the history of this island with unwanted reproductions, be aware…"

"Stop with your wild theories!" Grumbled Grady, half worried by his colleague's teasing. "I'm starting to sweat…"

"Speak of the devil..."

Sembène, who was facing the front door, saw Dearing cross the threshold and enter the tavern.  
Grady turned around and saw her too.

"Right on time," he said, looking at his watch.

"It's the moment of truth. _Courage, garcon!_ "

Dearing spotted Grady after briefly looking for him and she then came to them.

"Good evening sirs."

"Good evening," they replied courteously.

"Barry? Can I talk to Owen for a minute in private?" She asked the Frenchman.

"No problem, ma'am."

Grady put down his pint and got up.  
Dearing invited him to follow her along the span and once they were far, Sembène took out his phone to write a text.


	19. The Director and the Keeper

Meanwhile, Young had introduced Zach to her friends of the control room.  
He had sat next to Cruthers, in front of his colleagues, and the two technicians were asking him questions to get to know him better.

When Krill saw Dearing enter into the tavern, she informed Zach:

"There's your aunt who just came in."

"She told me earlier that she had to come here to meet a colleague," he said.

"It seems that we got this famous colleague," Young said, restraining herself from giggling when she saw Grady getting up to follow Dearing.

Having felt his cell phone vibrating, Cruthers took it out of his jeans pocket and lit it.  
He read the text he had just received and announced:

"Barry just sent me a text. You know what he's saying? _Awkwardness incoming!_ "

While both of his friends giggled, leaving Zach, who had not idea of what they were talking about, confused, Cruthers turned towards Grady's colleague and nodded to him. Sembène answered by raising his pint in their direction.  
Then, the nose in his glass, slowly and discreetly, Cruthers followed Dearing and Grady who, after walking along the dance floor for a few meters, passed between the columns of the span, entering an area of the tavern where one could find the access door to the terrace but also the entrance of the toilets.

"Zara? I bet you two thousand _colón_ (*) that she's taking him to the bathrooms", he said.

When he saw that they had passed in front of the toilets entrance, Cruthers lost his smirk and pulled the two thousand colón from his wallet with a sigh.

"Shit ..." he whispered as he handed the money to his friend.

"What kind of insinuations were those, Lowery? I don't think my aunt is that kind of woman," Zach protested.

"Naiveté is a beautiful thing, especially when it comes from a guy of your age," Cruthers replied.

"I missed an episode or what?" Dearing's nephew asked.

"Rather a whole season," Krill chuckled.

"Come on, who is volunteering to give him some explanations?" Cruthers said before immediately pinching his ear.

In the blink of an eye, Young and Krill rushed to repeat this gesture and he revealed the name of this game's loser.

"Zara, you lost! Yes, your luck has turned."

The assistant interlocked her hands and thought for a minute.

"So. Where do I start?"

X

"Where are you taking me?" Grady asked.

"To the lower terrace," Dearing answered. "It's too noisy inside and I need you to be attentive. We have to talk about a pretty sensitive topic..."

"Which one?" Thekeeper asked with some apprehension.

Dearing opened the door of the upper terrace and they ended up outside, leaving behind the brouhaha that reigned in the tavern.  
The Merry Iguanodon had two terraces: the upper one, with gravel-covered ground, formed an inverted L around the north-eastern corner of the tavern and overlooked the second, the lower terrace with a paved surface, which extended under the shadow of two Guanacaste trees and overhung the quay along the southern bank of the pond.  
On either side of the path that connected the door to the stairs that linked the terraces, customers were sitting around round wooden tables lit by lanterns or sitting on rudimentary benches set around braziers, chatting and drinking around the fire.

"Reassure me. You're not going to tell me that we actually have a kid?"

The director chuckled for a moment before taking back her seriousness.

"But of course not ... Don't be so paranoid. Even if it had been the case, you would have been the first informed, trust me," she answered in a mocking air. "And if my reputation didn't matter and I wanted to make a joke about it, I would have pushed realism so far that I would have driven you mad. But let's talk about the real reason behind my coming..."

They started to climb down the steps to the lower terrace.

"As you probably know, I gave a press conference this morning to present next year's novelty."

The reason of the meeting being purely of professional nature, Grady relaxed.

"The Indominus," he guessed, "or the jewel of the crown as you called her once. I had a quick glimpse of her in the quarantine paddocks when she was very young. I wonder how she looks like now because the rumors I heard sends shivers down your spine…"

"During the visit of the Coliseum, Masrani expressed some concerns, although he was satisfied at the time."

"Masrani is on the island? Interesting. Did he finally realized that he had to think twice before authorizing the creation and the exhibition of a carnivore larger and more aggressive than a T. rex?"

They stopped at the end of the lower terrace, as a more than a thousand visitors were attending a sound and light show involving fountains, lasers, images on screens of water and pyrotechnic effects. The visitors were either sitting in the bleachers or massed on the stone bridge.

"The problem is that nothing remains hidden from him," Dearing said, "and he quickly noticed that we had some mishaps related to the Indominus behaviour. And he wondered that since you control the raptors…"

"I don't control the raptors, they tolerate me," Grady corrected. "I managed to create with them a relationship based on mutual respect and not on control. With you, everything revolves around this notion and the problem is there: You want so much to control everything that it poisons your relationships with people and it's one of the main reasons which prevented us from having a healthy relationship in the long run."

Dearing, who had noticed a couple sitting on a bench nearby, replied sharply:

"Let's avoid washing our dirty laundry in public! I would like to not bring up the past for the moment and for the sake of the attraction, we will have to collaborate and it won't work if we already start to smack each other around."

A grin appeared on Grady's mouth.

"Attraction? That's what you're calling the Indominus? As much as I don't like this animal because of the purely mercantile reasons behind her creation, I must tell you that she is not a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet. She is a living being like every other in this park with needs. In her head, it's _I have to hunt, I have to eat, I have to fuck._ "

The keeper looked Dearing in the eyes and added, in a low and smooth voice:

"In a way, she's not that different than you because we both know that you are familiar with at least two of these needs."

The director rolled her eyes and then replied in a jaded tone:

"Oh, I forgot how your humor was subtle. As subtle as a sauropod in a china shop..."

She gently put her hand on his shoulder, pulled closer to his ear and whispered:

"Let me remind you that _I_ am at the helm of this park and that _you_ are just one employee among many others. Consider yourself lucky that we both had fun in the past and that you had reach and a stallion's stamina because trust me on this, if it hadn't been the case, I wouldn't be so lenient with you right now."

Grady lost his teasing look and Dearing pulled her face away.

"Let's go back to the I. rex. She will receive a new subcutaneous implant tomorrow morning and so while she is being operated, I ask you to inspect the enclosure from the inside, put yourself in the place of the animal as you know how to do… Well, I'm not going to stay any longer because I promised to the youngest of my nephews that I wouldn't be late. I suggested to him that we go see _The Last Jedi_ but he refused. Which is fine in a way because from what I've heard and read, this movie looks like a big pile of shit."

"Worse than that comforter movie that was episode seven? I've heard of the same kind of feedback. Hollywood is really turning to shit…" Grady said while he was staring at the pond. "I didn't know you had nephews… or I didn't remember. It must be said that you barely told me about your family."

When he turned his head towards her, he noticed that she had almost reached the steps, leaving him alone at the edge of the terrace.

"When I will have to meet you tomorrow?" He asked her.

Dearing turned around and answered:

"Eight thirty sharp. In front of the construction site."

"That works me, although I would have liked to do something else on a Sunday morning than extra hours, on Christmas Eve moreover. I didn't even put my little Christmas tree. Well, see you tomorrow!"

"See you tomorrow!"

She turned away from him and began to climb the steps.

"Don't be late!" She warned him over her shoulder.

"The word late is not part of my vocabulary," Grady pretended aloud.

"Surely…"

Further away behind them, patches of smoke began to come out of the interstices along the summit of the spurs of the Discovery Centre and an orange light appeared shortly after in the crater of the artificial volcano, becoming more and more vivid, even seeming to overflow the crater rims while a loud rumbling came out of some loudspeakers.  
Then, the rumbling stopped and suddenly, a powerful beam of orange and red light rose from the crater, and climbed towards the night sky, so high that is was visible from kilometres around.  
This false eruption marking the climax of the show, the atmosphere around the pond was filled with a thunderous applause.

X

"So, if I understand correctly, this Owen was the boyfriend of my aunt?" Zach recapitulated.

"Boyfriend is quite a big word," Cruthers replied. "The most appropriate term would be..."

"Fuck buddy," Krill finished, about to burst into laughter because of drunkenness, although she had drank only one cocktails and half of a pint of beer. "Sorry to shock you, Zach, but that's the truth."

"I'm eighteen years old, friends of mine have been involved in this kind of business. Besides, what do you want me to do? Ok, I didn't see her that way but hey, she does want she wants. On the other hand, if my mother came to learn about it, I don't tell you the gossips… And I still think it's risky for Claire to bang one of her employees, it could be used against her. Except you three, who knows about this?"

"Aside Barry, Owen's colleague, no one else. Normally at least ...," Krill answered. "They did everything they could to keep it quiet and they would have fooled us if I hadn't seen Owen run away from Claire's residence by climbing the fence like a thief while I was doing my morning jog."

"Then we thought back of the carnival party, the one we told you about, and I recalled that were turning around each other during it, although we could have explained that by the fact that they were completely drunk," Cruthers narrated.

"Once," added Young, "Claire sent me a naughty message by mistake. It was written: _Tonight, make me roar as loud as a T. rex, my virile wapiti_."

At the mention of this nickname, the three burst out laughing, leaving Zach looking at them speechless with his mouth half-open.

"She was sweating when she came to give me some explanations," the assistant resumed, "and buy my silence by offering me two days off but that only confirmed the fact that there was something between those two. Well, I already knew that it was the case because when I brought Owen to Claire's office on one occasion when she was still deputy director, I surprised her looking at his ass before asking me, once he leaved, what was my opinion on him, intimating me that he was her private turf."

"And he was returning the favor by throwing a few more or less discrete glances at her silhouette ... Some people spend their lives to determine who between Han and Greedo shot first and well, it's kinda the same thing with us, we try to find out which one of them turned on the other first. It's stupid I know, but it's fun," Cruthers said.

"And why did they stop seeing each other?" Zach asked.

"For the same reason that pushed them towards each other," Young said after taking a sip of beer. "Both are alphas that are addicted to challenge. We like to think that Owen has a kind of professional deformation and that he is attracted by keen women with a strong character, traits that would be similar to those of the predators with which he is working, while Claire was looking for someone who would dare to stand up to her, not to just annoy her but to genuinely assert his position."

"Oh, she's demanding when it comes to men! She wants guys like Conan! John Carter! Aragorn! Geralt of Rivia! Not puny ones with spaghetti arms like Lowery."

"Vivian! I'm your boss!" Cruthers retorted, feigning a reprimand.

"But it turned out that Claire's control-freak side must have been so annoying for Owen that one day he came to see her at the administration to tell her he wanted to stop," finished Young. "I was on the other side of the door when it happened..."

"He hasn't been out with any other women since however. Deep down, I'm sure that he has still feelings for her but he's just too proud to admit it," Krill said.

"We can say that things happen on this island," Zach concluded.

"Yeah. The behind the scenes of the world's largest family theme park can be summarized as sex, drugs and rock and roll," she declared.

Zach's eyes widened.

"Drugs?" He repeated, stunned.

"In addition to the Mexican mushrooms, there is the _Magical Liopleurodon_ , also known as _Lioplo_ , a homemade drug with effects comparable to those of LSD, synthesized by some employees wanting to make ends meet at the end of the month. Some claims that a toxin found in the _Compsognathus'_ saliva is a key ingredient," Cruthers stated, "The J-SEC searched the Depths but didn't find anything as business of dubious nature and more or less legal usually take place there. Some of the officers believe that the lab must be in one of the abandoned premises in the northern and eastern parts of the island, or even in the abandoned tunnels that can also be found there, running under the mountains and the hills, places that sent chills down your spin and where few dared to go," he added, shivering. "According to an urban myth, the island's underground is far from being uninhabited…"

A trio of persons in dark green-grey fatigues entered into the tavern.  
When they walked along the span, heading for the stairs leading to the mezzanines, Zach saw them and he remembered that he saw a man wearing the same uniform in the cage of the tyrannosaur enclosure.  
A Japanese man in his fifties was walking in front of the two others, of a younger age, around forty years old. There was a Native American woman with long raven hairs and an athletic figure, and a stocky and muscular man, smaller than the woman and bearing sideburns.

"Who are these people?" He asked Cruthers.

"The Grey Guard, a military force created by the UN after the Horseshoe Bay incident to ensure a more effective quarantine of the Five Deaths Archipelago where dinosaurs had returned to the wild."

"The Horseshoe Bay incident?"

"It happened at the end of 2001 in British Columbia. Pteranodons escaped from their aviary on Isla Sorna had flew up there and wreak havoc in the area before being killed. It had been on the front page for a while. Maybe you were too young to remember... "

"So these people are like blue helmets?"

"Not really. Many see them as nothing more than a glorified mercenary company. Do you know the X-COM videogame series?"

"Vaguely. The one where soldiers from all over the world are fighting aliens together?"

"Well, the Grey Guard is a bit like a mix between the X-COM organization, the French Foreign Legion and the Night's Watch from _Game of Thrones_..."

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) A US dollar is worth about six hundred Costa Rican colón.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _Hypothetical Casting:_

 _ **Erica Cerra** as Selma Forrester, one of the guards with Hamada.  
_ _ **Geoff Gustafson** as Niall Forrester, one of the guards with Hamada._


	20. Cave Dracones

Hamada and the two other guards, some Canadians, climbed the stairs up to the second floor, where they took the aisle that ran along the guardrail of the mezzanine, walking on a few meters before stopping in front of an ajar door that the captain pushed.

They entered in a lounge where around twenty of their colleagues, dressed in civilian clothes for the majority and scattered throughout the room and the adjoining balcony.  
While the officers had gathered around a round table to play cards, the other guards were busy playing darts, pool or, slouched in sofas, watching television.  
All interrupted their activities to greet the newcomers.  
The youngest took special care to greet their captain in a brief but respectful way while the officers allowed themselves to call him by his first name.

"I don't believe it, it's those fucking Forresters!" Exclaimed one of the latter, a black woman with hairs cut close to the scalp, when she recognized the two guards with Hamada. "I didn't expect to see your mugs anytime soon!"

"Ah Patience, we had forgotten how your name was the opposite of your temperament. Nice to see you again, my friend," The man said to her before he and his partner went to hug her and the other officers.

"What news from the Five Deaths?" Asked a tall, bald Scottish man with a thick moustache and sparkling eyes, Lieutenant Duncan Glenmore.

"Oh, routine ..." the man replied. "The scalys have now almost invaded the entire archipelago and we had a skirmish with a poaching vessel in the Sea of Ghosts two months ago."

The Five Deaths, or Las Cinco Muertes in Spanish, is a chain of volcanic islands that forms a crescent about a hundred kilometres southwest of Isla Nublar. They are called Matanceros, Muerta, Sorna, Tacaño and Pena, all names related to death.  
The origin of the name of the archipelago is actually much older than InGen since it came from a local legend that tells the story of a warrior who went on each of the islands to undergo five different deaths: Burned, drowned, crushed, hanged and beheaded.  
Conversely, the waters around the archipelago were renamed the Sea of Ghosts only recently because of not only the fog that prevailed there frequently but also since some pretended that one could hear the moans of those who or which died in these waters, whether the fisherman who disappeared or the dinosaurs that went too far offshore.  
Of all these islands, Isla Sorna is the biggest and the most famous because of the media coverage it once had.

After the San Diego incident, the Committee on the Containment and Control of Deextincted Life Forms, also known as CCCDLF, was set up by the United Nations in order to ban the access to Isla Sorna and monitor its Mesozoic fauna.  
But the means put in place to dissuade any intruder, a spy plane and a pre-recorded radio message, were derisory and the illegal tour operators were quickly followed by poachers.  
This poaching phenomenon, combined with the political and media fallout of the Horseshoe Bay incident, urged the Security Council to unanimously adopt a resolution in late December 2001 to create the United Nations Missions in the Five Deaths Archipelago (UNMFDA).  
Through this resolution, the Security Council founded an international military force whose role would be to put the island under a more effective quarantine, the future Grey Guard.

For his part, Simon Masrani had argued with the UN for nearly three years in order to obtain the authorisation of the construction of a new dinosaur park on Isla Nublar because, according to him, it was the best solution to divert the world's attention from Isla Sorna and thus put an end to illegal tourism and poaching.  
Convinced, the Security Council invited him to sign agreements in San José in February 2002. In those, it was stipulated that the UN, through the Costa Rican government, authorised Simon Masrani to build Jurassic World in exchange for the authorisation of the establishment of a Grey Guard's garrison on Nublar once the park built in order to ensure the maintenance of a high level of security, a material and financial support to the Guard and, above all, the definitive return of the Five Deaths under Costa Rican and UN jurisdiction with all the creature that lived there.  
Despite this heavy toll, Masrani signed the agreements, an act to which several members of InGen's board of directors reacted with anger and created a deep resentment of them against the Indian tycoon.

The first group of guards, to which Katashi Hamada had belonged, landed on Sorna in the beginning of the summer of 2002 while their base was being built on the northern coast of the island, Caer Draig, or Dragon Castle in Welsh, named that way by Lord Bleidd Pennant, a Welsh aristocrat and decorated colonel of the British army who founded the Guard with other foreign officers and became its first marshal.  
The first years of the organization were difficult and many guards were killed in the line of duty, either by members of the wildlife they were protecting or by poachers.  
Although the latter were initially only peasants and fishermen armed with hunting rifles and machetes, they were soon supported by foreign mercenaries who brought with them more sophisticated equipment, of military manufacturing.  
Real skirmishes took place on Isla Sorna, and the poachers were only driven out of the Five Deaths when the guards stormed the outpost they had established in the middle of the jungle of Isla Matanceros.  
In order to prevent anyone unauthorised from setting foot on the islands, boats were provided to the Guard to blockade the archipelago and even though some vessels and aircrafts were trying to fall through the cracks from time to time, most of them were stopped in time and delivered to the Costa Rican authorities.

Animal trafficking is often considered as the world's third largest illegal trade behind drugs and weapons trafficking, and like in the case of the latter, forces of law and order of several countries under the aegis of Interpol are involved in a concerted struggle against poaching mafia rings.  
Following a series of investigations, it was discovered that some rich Westerners, emirs of the Gulf countries and a Hong Kongese triad had financed poachers in addition to hire the mercenaries that supported them.  
On InGen's side, a spy sent by Hoskins to Biosyn discovered that employees of this rival company of InGen frequented the black market in order to acquire specimens, dead or alive.

Several news items involving dinosaurs illegally held in captivity by private individuals made the headlines, and when people talked about this subject, they usually had in mind the story of the owner of a famous Las Vegas casino that was found dead in his house, devoured by his _Neoraptor_ , or the one of a herrerasaur who had spent the majority of his life in the menagerie of a Colombian drug baron before being retrieved during a raid of the special forces and, once healed by veterinaries, sent back to Costa Rica so he could spent the rest in his life in Jurassic World.  
To prevent such incidents, a new objective was given to the CCCDLF, the one of advising member countries on the establishment and the enforcement of regulations for the international trade of de-extinct species.  
Once the poaching had greatly declined, the guards knew a certain form of routine, spending their days patrolling, dismantling the facilities of old Site B and escorting the scientists that conducted studies on the wild dinosaurs.

During the mid-2010s, the Grey Guard had just under four hundred members deployed in the Five Deaths and on Isla Nublar, which had a garrison of ninety guards.  
Recruitment was open to anyone with at least three years of experience in the armed forces or the police of any UN member state.  
After a thorough examination of each file, the candidates were summoned for several weeks of intensive training and tests at the barracks of the Isla Nublar's garrison.  
That year, five candidates passed the tests, three men and two women. Most of them were under thirty years old and all wore a grey T-shirt with the coat of arms of the Guard, consisting of five white stars forming a crescent against a grey background, each for one of the Five Deaths, as well as a dragon, which was a metaphorical representation of the archipelago's fauna. Under the coat of arms, one could read "Cave Dracones", _Beware the dragons_ in Latin, the motto of the organization.  
This was the official logo of the order, but not the first version, which had human skulls instead of stars. Its appearance had been considered too sinister by the UN authorities, it couldn't had been chosen to appear on the official documents and the assets of the organization but being very appreciated by the guards themselves, T-shirts and flags bearing it were made.

The Forresters stared at the recruits, as if they were checking themselves that they were fit.

"Look at them, they look so frail for the most part. A gust of wind and they fly away," the woman whispered to her husband with a laugh as they were walking towards them.

"Hi, rookies!" He greeted them. "You're having a good evening?"

"Yes thank you," replied a Latin American who was a little chubby but of a robust constitution. "And you?"

"We just arrived," the woman said. "My name is Selma and here is my husband and faithful companion in arms, Niall."

"You're replacing Coria and Black for the holidays?" Asked a young, thin and pale Englishman with curly black hair.

"Indeed, and in early January, we will leave for Caer Draig in the charming company of one or a few of you according to the recommendations of Captain Hamada."

The recruits then introduced themselves to the Forresters.  
The Latino, a Costa Rican from a coastal village, was called Julio Velasquez and the Englishman Gareth Turner.  
The oldest of the five, around thirty-four years old, was a Chinese woman named Mei Tian.

"Mei? So you're Lieutenant Yu's niece?" Selma said, shaking her hand warmly. "He send you his greetings."

"Indeed," Tian replied. "It was him who advised me to serve a few years in the Guard to see something else than my home city of Qingdao and live, according to him, an experience like no other."

When the second woman among the recruits, a small blonde with hairs cut at the level of the chin and a square jaw, wanted to introduce herself, a red-haired guy from Colorado with a fox-like face named McKormick said:

"So her, it's Tamara Durant. Tamara, the nice Nazi."

"But I'm not a Nazi!" She protested.

"Why do you call her like that?" Selma asked.

"Because she's from Idaho and it's well known that there, it's full of neo-Nazis," McKormick pretended in a mocking tone.

"Yeah, well, that doesn't make me laugh," Durant said, giving him a dirty look.

The Forresters arrived at the fifth recruit, an Egyptian of the same age and constitution as Turner.  
When he said his name, Ben Rahim, Niall looked at him with amusement.

"Wait, Rahim? The Rahim who got very drunk during a weekend of leave in San José, thought he was in the infirmary of the barracks when he woke up in the hospital and wanted to cross all of the city to go back to the inn while he still had vomit on his T-shirt?"

"I plead guilty," Rahim admitted humbly, not offended by the mention of his misadventure and willingly laughing at himself.

"When this story reached Caer Draig through Slink who picked you up in his car on the way…," Selma told, "I'm not telling you about the fit of laughter we had at dinner. You're like a legend there, kid…"

X

Meanwhile, Hamada sat at the round table and joined the officers in their card game.  
In addition to Sergeant Patience Bellamy, who was from Louisiana, and Lieutenant Duncan Glenmore, there was Sergeant Leif Drekanson, a Norwegian with a red and thick beard; Lieutenant Erin Laurence, an Australian in the middle of her forties, with long blond hair grouped together in a braid, wearing the T-Shirt of a metal band; and a Frenchman, Lieutenant Gilbert Brunet, around sixty years old, with greying hairs that were once jet black, a little shorter than Glenmore but burlier and still quite tall.

"So Katashi, any news for the bunkers?" Laurence asked, sitting to his left.

"I spoke to Dearing this morning. It will be no," he announced, sighing and shaking his head.

An expression of disappointment and discontent appeared on the faces of the officers.

"Fuck, she can really be a pain in the ass!" Bellamy said.

"For a start, we had to fight with the Administration to bring an adequate equipment, so we should have expected that she will be reluctant to launch the construction of bunkers, which, by the way, would have really been useful in the case of a big incident. She thinks we will dare to come to ask her to put some anti-aircraft guns around Richard Owen Avenue and watchtowers along the coast," Brunet added in his gruff voice.

"Well, the problem is that since there has never been a major incident in the twelve years of existence of this park, management has become too confident over time," Drekanson said.

"They mostly forget that we are each time behind them to clean their shit," retorted the Frenchman. "If ever it turns out in the future that we needed the bunkers, Dearing better not come to us whining!"

Gilbert Brunet was not known for his restraint and when something bothered him, he did not hesitate to tell it loud and clear.  
Born in Franche-Comté and son of farmers, he had joined the French army at the age of eighteen and served in it during a dozen of years before leaving and becoming a mercenary, first in Africa then in ex –Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe before leaving for the New World in the early 2000s.

"Let's talk about more joyful things, will you?" Glenmore intervened. "Your cousin's cheese have arrived, Gilbert?"

"Yes. They are in my fridge."

"Good. I cannot wait to cut a piece and Patience, it's almost like I already smell the spicy aroma of your so delicious jambalaya."

"Be patient, Duncan. If I want it to be ready for eight tomorrow, I'll have to start cooking by the end of the afternoon."

"It will be Christmas Eve. I would not mind if you leave the service a little earlier," Hamada told them as he was putting his card on the table. "I might do the same to prepare the fish."

X

At the other end of the room, Niall Forrester forcefully threw a dart and it landed on the rim of the second circle of the target.  
The recruits had invited the couple to play a game of darts and they had naturally accepted.  
When Niall stepped aside to make room for another player, Tian asked him:

"How is Isla Sorna? When Lieutenant Brunet made a presentation about it, it seemed like he was talking of the alien world of Pandora."

"Maybe he is exaggerating a little to freak you out but on the other hand, there is somewhat of a comparison," Niall said. "It's not the kind of place for a walk in the park. Moreover, if Caer Draig was built on the coast, it was to avoid trespassing on the territories of the biggest and most dangerous dinosaurs which are the reason why the heart of the island is a real cut-throat area where you only go aboard armored vehicles."

Turner threw a dart that went inside the second circle of the target.

"Not bad kid!" Selma said, impressed.

Then, suddenly, she pulled a dagger out of her pocket and threw it forcefully on the target.

"But not enough," she added, giving the young man a pat on the shoulder.

Once the effect of surprise passed, Turner widely opened his eyes when he saw that the blade of Selma's dagger was stuck in the centre of the target.  
As she pulled her dagger away from the target, a feminine voice with an Eastern European accent who had remained silent until then said:

"Maybe your wife is very precise when it comes to hit a target on a short range but I doubt that she surpasses me when it comes to long-range targets."

Niall turned to the one who had just teased his wife and who was sitting on the sofa, watching TV while her long, slightly wavy black hair were resting on her shoulders.

She was Warrant Officer Nataliya Darbinian, a Russian of Armenian descent who grew up in a military family and a member of the Special Forces before joining the Guard.  
In her early thirties and quite tall with a slender silhouette, a fair skin, big bewitching grey eyes… Darbinian was a very beautiful woman, but her face and smile were often marked by a certain mischief and it was said that she had a certain look, full of cunning and intelligence, always analysing her environment in a slow and precise manner, like a predator. Darbinian was best known for being one of the Grey Guard's best snipers, as good with a rifle than with a bow.

Niall glanced at the TV screen where a film from the seventies was being broadcast.  
He saw a cowboy riding through a desert landscape, fleeing a figure dressed in black who had the particularity of having jerky head movements, like if he wasn't human.  
Then an infrared vision of the fugitive appeared on the screen, meaning that the point of view of the character in black had been adopted and one could also hear small sounds of pistons. Niall concluded that the character must be an android or a cyborg.

"Instead of criticizing Nataliya, can you tell me what is the name of the movie you are watching?" He asked, curious.

"I don't know. We found it by channel-hopping."

"It's about a state-of-the-art theme park that goes south," said a Jamaican called Percy Baker, who was also on the sofa watching the film and picking peanuts on a bowl.

"It vaguely reminds me of something..." Selma said, pretending to rack her brain.

"Except that on this island, morality and common sense forbid guests to fornicate with the hosts," Darbinian clarified.

"Says so the one who think that Bucephalus has a good member," Turner coughed in his corner.

"Bucephalus, the shantungo who is the kind of attacking on sight?" Selma asked. "I knew him when he was the size of a sheep."

"Well, unlike some, he knows how to satisfy the ladies. Isn't it Gareth?" Darbinian replied in a voice so loud that even the officers at the other end of the room heard her.

They glanced at Turner and Darbinian with amusement and while Hamada just raised an eyebrow and kept his serious look, Brunet and Glenmore couldn't help but to smile and giggle whereas Laurence was seen giving colons to Bellamy, the latter just ending up winning a bet they had.

"Poor Gareth, umpteenth victim of Nataliya. Let's pray for his soul," Glenmore chuckled.

While Darbinian showed great rigor and professionalism during service in the presence of superiors or people external of the Guard, she relaxed outside, drinking and playing willingly and when a man caught her interest, generally beautiful and honest but uptight young men, she didn't hesitate to seduce him.

She liked to remind to the others an episode that happened shortly after the arrival of the recruits on the island and in which Turner, as he was wandering in the jungle somewhere southwest of the Long Lake in an area not frequented by visitors, had surprised Darbinian bathing naked in a creek.  
As he had never seen her before, he had thought that she was a lost tourist and from behind a thicket in order to respect her privacy, he had asked her to put her clothes back on so that she could follow him back to the closest visitor area. Darbinian, who had seen out of the corner of her eye green-grey fatigues approaching her bathing place, complied just to better destabilize him afterwards.  
When she got out of the water all soaked, she had asked him to give her towel and clothes. When Turner noticed that there was fatigues of the same colour as his among them and on which he could read the rank of warrant officer, he had immediately apologized for disturbing her, but Darbinian, who was wiping herself in front of him without the slightest embarrassment, had only let out a small crystalline laugh.

"At ease, recruit." She had told him.

She had explained to him that she had finished anyway and, as she had only put on her pants, she had added in a tone of false reprimand:

"It's nice to keep staying to attention but put your stick on the side, Turner. It will be more discreet."

And she left, leaving him ashamed at the edge of the water. When he went to dinner at the mess that very evening, he had seen her again, telling this rather comical meeting to a colleague of the same nationality as her who was laughing heartily.

As a result, the fact that she had slept with Turner did not surprise anyone, even though most of the officers had fun pretending to be surprised in the purpose of further disconcerting the poor Turner who had frozen on the spot and whose face's colour had turned to crimson.

"Relax friend!" Niall comforted him by giving a big slap on the back that made him jump. "The whole garrison probably already knew it. Last I noticed, I remind you that the walls of the barracks apartments are poorly soundproofed, making them a bad place to keep secrets. Concerning your shortcomings, it's by a forging that one becomes a blacksmith as a French proverb says so don't give up!"

The two returned to the game of darts and while the two Forresters were waiting for their turn on the side, Niall said:

"So, if you have joined the guard I hope for you that it wasn't entirely because of environmental conviction. If it is, I would regret to tell you that you have knocked at the wrong door."

"You will probably agree with us on the fact that the dinosaurs are not originally a part of the local fauna and that when they were released during that hurricane, well they must had seriously wreak havoc the island's ecosystem," Selma continued.

"Maybe there was an endemic species of flower which was entirely grazed while the populations of some ground-nesting bird were decimated by predators they never saw," supposed her husband. "In Caer Draig, ecologists are studying these kinds of cases and trying to accurately measure the impact of the dinosaurs on these islands."

"But they also think that a large-scaled extermination operation would not necessarily arrange things since over time, a semblance of ecosystem had appeared in these islands. For now, non-intervention is recommended."

"In the end, we are nothing more than a small army of warrior shepherds, watching over this quite unique livestock like one would watch a sensitive industrial site," Niall summed up. "We don't join the guard for the dinosaurs but for the experience of living in a small international community in the middle of nowhere, isolated from a world losing its bearings. Some are also there for the adrenaline or in the opposite to revitalize, others for the pay, quite a number to avoid being sent to participate in dubious wars. There also some who saw in the Guard a way to flee their past or to atone for their faults… Others have seen in it a way of exile…," he added more seriously.

He saw someone entering into the room, the manager of the tavern, a seventy year old black man who had the distinctive features of having his left eye hidden behind an eye patch and a lame leg.

"Ah Lambert, how are you, you old bandit?" Niall asked to him. "How's business?"

Lambert Ross came to greet the Forresters.

"Routine. During the night from Monday to Tuesday, a French group, from Berry for what I heard, got too drunk and began to yell some bawdy songs, for a good half an hour until one of them puked in a dish. It wasn't a pretty sight. But otherwise, nothing special," replied the innkeeper.

He took out his smartphone and asked them what they wanted to drink:

"Two pints of your best beer, please," Selma said.

Ross noted their order and then turned to the officers' table.

"And you Katashi?"

"A whisky, as usual."

"And a coffee, please Lambert, with two sugars," Brunet added.

The innkeeper sent a message to one of the waiters and a little more than one minute later, said waiter appeared in the doorway, bring them the ordered drinks.

Just after the Forresters had toasted, ripples began to appear on the surface of all the drinks that weren't hold in hand and they heard the dishes clattering inside one of the sideboards.  
Above the table, the chandelier swayed slightly and the rest of the tavern, previously buzzing, was reduced to silence.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _Hypothetical Casting :_

 _In order of appearance :_

 _ **Christine Adams** as Patience Bellamy_  
 _ **Graham McTavish** as Duncan Glenmore  
_ _ **Miguel Izaguirre** as Julio Velasquez  
_ _ **George Blagden** as Gareth Turner_  
 _ **Zhu Zhu** as Mei Tian_  
 _ **Caity Lotz** as Tamara Durant_  
 _ **Claudia Black** as Erin Laurence_  
 _ **Lionnel Astier** as Gilbert Brunet_  
 _ **Kristofer Hivju** as Leif Drekanson_  
 _ **Angela Sarafyan** as Nataliya Darbinian_  
 _ **Joe Morton** as Lambert Ross_

 _Just like Arnold Mountbatten, Lord Bleidd Pennant doesn't appear in this story but I imagine him looking like **Luke Evans**._


	21. Ross' Story

When the vibrations ceased, the loud and plaintive roar that the tyrannosaur unleashed in response to this manifestation of Nature was heard throughout the city, surprising and disturbing many.

A few moments later, the usual brouhaha of the tavern came back and Ross left the guards to make sure that nothing was damaged during the tremor.

"It was the second this week and the fifth this month. Something is brewing down here and something big...," Brunet said.

"But what?" Durant asked, worried.

"Mount Sibo, lassie," Glenmore answered while he was looking out the window to the north.

There was nothing but silence for a few seconds.

"Do you think it's waking up, Lieutenant? She asked.

"Perhaps..."

"The rex didn't roar like that before the small eruption of 2006," Hamada remembered. "The one that is looming may make it look like a New Year's fireworks. I would lie if I said that I am not worried."

"And that roar was not the only sign from the animals," Drekanson said. "The biologist from the Ministry of Environment who came to do an ornithological survey at the end of last week around Little Gorgoroth (*) saw snakes coming out of their holes and heading south as well as birds leaving their eyries on the mountain. When I passed in the area today, I saw a family of coatis quickly crossing the road. They too were moving in the opposite direction of the volcano…"

"And let's not talk about the quetzals and the harpactos," Darbinian added. "Those infernal birds are becoming more and more agitated and aggressive, clinging on to the mesh of the aviary, trying to pull their heads out, and screaming at the visitors. The situation there is starting to get so tense that the keepers are wondering if they should close the attraction for a while until it's over."

"Does anyone know what the readings from the geothermal power plant are indicating?" Hamada asked.

"I asked the guys from there. They measured an increasing activity," Baker reported. "We can say that things may start to go downhill…"

Many questions were raised about the management of a crisis due to a volcanic eruption on the island and while there were discussions all across the room, some faces, especially those of the recruits at the exception of Velasquez, became livid at the idea of an upcoming disaster.

"Why those long faces?" Glenmore asked them. "The Sibo is neither the Santorini, the Krakatoa nor Mount St. Helens. Maybe there will be nothing after all…"

"It has erupted several times across history but the island has neither exploded nor sunk in the ocean," One of the guards intervened, an indigenous Costa Rican with marked features and hairs grouped in a ponytail. "It's typical of monotheists to necessarily see an apocalyptic disaster in a volcanic eruption… If the settlers of San Fernandez hadn't been so unconscious, to not say stupid," he added with some disdain, "they would have built their colony far enough from the Sibo and not at its foot. That would have saved them from ending up in ashes…"

"There will be a big boom and we will sweat like pigs when we will have to extinguish the eventual forest fires but let's try to see the good side of things," Glenmore said, trying to bring a bit of casualness in the discussion. "Mother Nature will give us a sound and light show for free. If conditions are good, we may even have a volcanic lightning like in that eruption in Chile a few years ago."

"Speaking of constructions at the foot of the volcano, should I remind you dear colleagues that the Coliseum is in the vicinity," Brunet reminded them.

"Oh I forgot about that ... Hopefully the workers will have finished the trench by then. Do you know how long it will take?" Laurence asked.

"They should have finished digging in a few days," Hamada replied.

"I don't want to be demanding but it will be better if it's as soon as possible! I wouldn't like to help evacuate the I. rex in a hurry and if it was up to me, I would let her suffocate in her holding room," Brunet admitted.

"As monstrous and unnatural as she is, she is only an animal," Laurence said. "It would be a horrible thing to do that without taking care to end her life humanly beforehand to spare her any suffering. In the highly improbable case where management would want to abandon her of course."

"That bitch is too dangerous and by looking at some of her habits, I would say that she is also completely nuts, just like management which seeks to accumulate the biggest or the most vicious beast since they are the one who attracts people, even if it means taking unnecessary risks."

"The problem of Mr Masrani and the people in the Administration is that they consider that the security of the island is acquired and that nothing can shake it," added Ross, who had returned in the lounge in the meantime. "The fact is that they forget or ignore what had to be done to make Isla Nublar safe again."

The recruits exchanged perplexed glances.

"Since you are fully integrated into the Guard now, it's time to tell you what happened on this island during the construction, at least what we know," Hamada told them.

"There are classified documents in InGen's archives and whose existence is even ignored by Dearing. Only the board of directors and the heads of the security division have access to them while some of the information they contains are also known by some representatives of the UN and the Costa Rican government as well as Masrani himself. They are about what happened during the construction," Ross revealed. "Julio, as a Costa Rican, you must have heard about all those workers who had serious accidents or died?"

"Yes," Velasquez replied, "there is even a guy from my village who was crushed by a digger. There was so little left of him that is was an empty coffin that was buried."

"I don't know if you knew him well, but if that was the case, I apologize in advance for telling you that he was certainly not killed by a digger but by a dinosaur," The innkeeper told him.

"Oh, I barely knew him but if what you are saying is true, what were the men of the security division supposed to protect the workers doing? And to say that my second cousin started working for it at this time. Speaking of him, he has the same tattoo as you," Velasquez remarked, referring to the tattoo on Ross's right forearm, representing Saint George of Lydda, riding his white steed and slaying the Dragon with his spear.

But when he mentioned this fact, many of the discussions stopped and many looked at him with a mix of surprise and suspicion.  
Bellamy violently put down her pint.

"That cousin of yours, Velasquez, what is his name?" She asked sharply.

"Cortez, sergeant. Paco Cortez."

Velasquez saw Bellamy and Hamada whispering for a few moments, then the discussions resumed where they had stopped.

"I knew your cousin," said Ross. You recruits may not know it, but before being a humble innkeeper, I worked for the security division as a henchman. Let me tell you about my experience."

Ross took a deep breath and began to tell his story:

 _"_ The year is 2003 CE. Isla Nublar is entirely occupied by InGen. Well, not entirely... Small clans of indomitable dinosaurs still holds out against the invaders. And life is not easy for the soldiers of InGen who garrison the fortified construction site of Burroughs… _"  
_  
He paused momentarily.

"If only I could tell you the rest with such casualness. At the time, the guys and I were aware of what happened to the guys from Operation Harvest as well as those of the 1994 expedition but as we were more numerous and better equipped than them, we went to the island with a bit of enthusiasm. When we landed in January 2002, the dinosaurs were discreet and it was thought that much of the former dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and their descendants had gradually faded. At this time, only the rex represented a serious obstacle for further work."

"What about the others?" Turner asked.

"Most of them had taken refuge in the most remote areas of the island, out of our reach, and we thought that they were too few to represent a threat. So to open the road to the north of the island, the decision to capture the tyrannosaur first was taken. What a mistake…"

"Why?" Durant asked, apprehending the answer.

"Recent events have shown that when a powerful authoritarian regime fell following the interference of foreign nations, groupuscules which until then had been repressed by the regime in question gained influence, came to power and it often happened that they were much worse than the previous regime. The rex was the guarantor of the fragile stability of her kingdom but we realized this too late, while the other carnivores had multiplied in the shadows. Once they devoured all of the herbivores we didn't captured, they fell back on the only available meat: human flesh. Some men started to not come back from their patrols and the carnivores became bolder, attacking in broad daylight and skirmishes happened in the middle of the jungle. They knew the island and its most well-hidden nooks better than us… The watch along the perimeter security was doubled but one night, the ghouls came out of their lair."

"The ghouls?" Rahim asked in a low voice.

"It's the nickname we gave to the proceratosaurs," Ross told him.

These carnivorous dinosaurs had been nicknamed that way since just like their folkloric namesakes, they dug up buried corpses to feed on them, even breaking the bones in order to reach and eat the marrow.  
And just as the innkeeper's voice let implied, these creatures were not confined to the role of scavengers.

"The ones I saw on Tacaño weren't such a big deal," McKormick said. "Any man with a minimum of training can defeat a proceratosaur with nothing else than a knife. With bare hands, it's not necessarily more complicated, it just requires some technique," he added casually.

"The individuals of this island are different from those that can be encountered in the Five Deaths, Ned," Ross retorted in a rather dry tone. "Bigger but also less fearful and more aggressive. It's the lack of competition with the raptors that made them like that ..."

The innkeeper resumed his story:

"They entered the camp without us knowing, attacking men as they were sleeping and causing panic. I still hear the gunshots, the growls and the panicked cries, but above all, I remember the fiery eyes that had stared at me for long seconds, those of Ghost Hand, the leader of these foul dinosaurs. While a part of the camp was burning, we finally managed to drive them out of the construction site. Twenty people had lost their lives during the attack, more than thirty were wounded and we realized that during their attack, the ghouls abducted a few others. That night, which was named the Night of the Claws, marked the beginning of a series of conflicts opposing the carnivores of the island to the invaders we were: The Saurian Wars. Noting the dreadful efficiency with which they were challenging us, Hoskins began to develop a form of obsession for these creatures, an obsession that later gave birth to the IBRIS program among other things. I never knew exactly how this "war" ended, having spent more than half of it stuck in a hospital bed in Puntarenas after an ambush by the Three Gorgons (**) who killed my comrades. This is one of those spitters cunts who did this to me…"

He was referring to his lame leg but also to his hidden left eye.  
Ross lifted the eye patch momentarily, revealing a white eye.  
During the ambush, one of the dilophosaurs had spit on the left half of Ross's face.  
When the venom had started to burn his eye, the pain was so excruciating that he had fallen on the ground immediately and when the reinforcements had finally arrived, the dilophosaur was devouring his leg.

"You must be aware that with these injuries, I couldn't do my job anymore and InGen offered me some money as a compensation. However, I had a dream when I was younger: Opening a tavern. Therefore, I used this money to build the Merry Iguanodon on the same island where I went through hell. Life likes to be ironic…"

"What happened to the ghouls, the Three Gorgons and all of the other predators?" Tian asked him.

"I have only been told of the fate of the Three Gorgons, shot one by one after several weeks of tracking, as well as the few herrerasaurs that roamed near the northern ruins, captured and integrated to the park's collection. But the ghouls... Masrani was so disgusted by them that he preferred that those captured went to live in the quarantine paddocks for the rest of their lives, far from the visitors sight and concerning the others of their species, I don't know their exact fate. When I was hospitalized, the construction of the Limes had made good progress. Its aim was to contain the remaining carnivores in the northern and easternmost parts of the island. When it was completed, the number of attacks began to drop drastically and after a little while, they showed no sign of life, as if they had been nothing but a legend…"

Once he had finished telling his story, Ross took leave of the guards and returned to take care of his establishment while the middle of the night was getting closer.

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) Nickname given by Jurassic World employees and Grey Guards to the desolate lands at the foot of Mount Sibo in reference to J.R.R Tolkien's Legendarium in which Gorgoroth is the name given to a large arid and volcanic plateau of Mordor and in the centre of which is located Mount Doom, the volcano were the One Ring was forged.

(**) Name given to a trio of female dilophosaurs who were as feared as the Ghost Hand's clan. They claimed more than twenty victims and because of their reputation, many consider them as a Costa Rican equivalent of the Tsavo Man-Eaters.


	22. Cruthers

The next morning, as the park was about to open in less than an hour, Cruthers was riding on his bicycle on the road that climbed towards the Administration's spur and humming the theme of Terry Gilliam's _Brazil_.

When he reached the parking lot, he left his bicycle on an area for this purpose, near tall poles at the top of which floated the Costa Rican flag and two others: One bearing the logo of Jurassic World and the other InGen's logo.  
The technician then took the direction of the entrance, crossing the bridge and climbing a staircase flanked by two fig trees, each bordering a basin embellished with aquatic plants. He passed under a large stone canopy supported by thick columns and entered into the cool reception through a large double glass door.  
The security guard stationed just behind the door let him in and the receptionist greeted him from behind the long counter in front of a wall adorned with InGen's logo and the company's slogan, " _We Make Your Future_."  
Cruthers greeted the receptionist and ended up in the Atrium, a long hall where employees liked to relax or meet before going to work or during breaks. One of its walls featured a large mural which represented the most iconic constructions and residents of the park.

Shortly after, as he was finishing humming the theme, Cruthers arrived at the control room.  
There, he asked for the night shift's report before he took place at his working station and as the digital clock was about to show half-past seven, the day staff began to arrive and relieve their colleagues, one after the other, coffee in hand for the most of them,  
Krill was among the first to arrive and as she was reaching her station, she noticed that Cruthers was wearing a T-shirt adorned with the logo of Jurassic Park.

"Hey, your T-shirt is pretty vintage! Where did you get it?" She asked, curious.

"It's nice, huh? I got it on _EBay_ for about a hundred and fifty dollars, but those of excellent quality are sold for something like three hundred."

"You spent that much for a mere T-shirt? Well Cruthers, you're not afraid of throwing money out of the window," said one of the technicians, a burly man in his forties with very short hairs and a pair of glasses.

"This T-shirt has a special sentimental value for me, Harriman. You have no idea of the effect that the first footage of the T. rex in San Diego had on my high-schooler brain. I especially remember that I stayed awake all night watching the news and went to the library the next morning to find everything I could about InGen and John Hammond. I was in a state of euphoria that cannot be described and this T-shirt helps me to recall this period of my life."

"So you admit that you are quite a big of a nostalgic? So be it. Let's just hope that it won't jinx us!" Harriman teased him. "You're coming to the Christmas feast tonight?"

"No, I'm organizing a buffet and movies evening at my place."

"By the way, Lowery, did you choose the movie we were going to watch tonight?" Krill asked.

"To be original, I thought of a genre movie which is set during Christmas and my list had therefore shortened to _Die Hard_ , _Gremlins_ and a French movie on World War I that someone recommended on Facebook. What do you think?"

"I'm not sure yet, we'll see tonight with Zara and the others."

The friendship between Cruthers and Krill had started prior Jurassic World.  
Both from Illinois, they had studied in the same university and course, although not at the same time since she was six years younger than him.  
They knew each other through mutual friends and even went out together for a while before breaking up on good terms.  
A few years later, Cruthers got married and had a daughter just before he started working on Isla Nublar in 2010.  
Since he and Krill had kept in touch since then, Cruthers had told his friend about the vacancy of a technician post following a lay-off and she moved to the island three years after Cruthers' arrival.  
As for Young, Krill had met her on the ferry during the crossing and the conversation had naturally begun when Krill learned that she was going to be the neighbour of the deputy director's assistant.

"Harriman, how things are going at the Coliseum?" Cruthers asked.

"The I. rex is locked in her holding room. The sedative is starting to take effect," his colleague answered, sipping his coffee and looking on his monitor while some were talking about the tremor they felt during the evening.


	23. Of Marketing

Somewhere in the eastern part of the island, Grady was driving on his _Triumph_ along a winding dirt road in the middle of the misty jungle.  
When the Misty Mounts were behind him, an electrified fence over six meters high, reinforced by thick steel posts and crowned with barbed wire appeared on the left of the keeper.  
This was the perimeter fence of the Reserve, an area stretching over five thousand hectares in the heart of the island and home to one of the park's oldest and most popular attractions, _Expedition: Lost World_ , a two-hour safari where visitors could encounter around thirty Mesozoic animal species.

At a bend, Mount Sibo and its top crowned with mist appeared and about two kilometres further, Grady arrived at a fork in the road: On the left, it skirted the lava fields and continued westward, passing not far from the _Quetzalcoatlus_ ' aviary; On the right, it led to a wooden bridge across the Black River, which started within the desolate slopes of the volcano and ended up in an inlet further east.  
Grady took the road on the right and after he crossed the river, he began to hear the sounds of construction machines and voices in Spanish, and at through a gap in the foliage, he saw workers with dark blue overalls and white helmets being busy around the trench, deep and wide enough to let a semitrailer move in its bottom.

Shortly after, Grady turned left and reached the parking spots near the construction site and where Dearing was already waiting for him, arms crossed and her back against her company car.  
She was wearing a blouse and a pair of jodhpurs, which, like her clothes of the previous day, were of a dazzling white, and she had swapped her heels for a pair of high-topped sandals while her hairs were restrained behind her ears thanks to pins.

"You are late," she told him as he parked his motorbike right in front of her.

"I'm neither late nor early," Grady retorted.

He took out a watch from one of the pockets of the leather jacket he was wearing over his shirt and looked at the configuration of the hands.

"According to my watch, I arrived precisely when I meant to," he said teasingly.

Dearing pulled her phone and looked at the screen.

"According to my phone, you're sixty-three seconds late," she said in a neutral tone.

"Oh, you're being picky," Grady complained.

Dearing did not answer and invited him to follow her to the entrance of the construction site. Grady whistled when he saw the attraction under construction.

"So that's the I. rex Coliseum? It looks like the Dragonpit of King's Landing...," he said sarcastically.

"You might be sarcastic now, but when you will see the Indominus, I'm sure you will think that it looks like a dragon. Actually, it was one of the intended goals since in addition to the usual palaeontologists and geneticists that works on recreating an extinct species, we called on a mythologist and a Hollywood creature designer for the making of a brand new dinosaur that, on the same time, is unusual and evokes some mythological monsters."

They passed the security post and unlike the day before, Dearing did not head for the observation bay of the enclosure but the entrance to the Colosseum itself, right in front of them.

"Which DNAs have been used?"

"The base is _Giganotosaurus_. I know that there is some T. rex but I can't remember the names of the other species that are unpronounceable for most of them."

She tapped away for a few seconds on her cell phone and handed it to Grady.

"Take it. In the PDF that I have just opened, there is the information that will be published on the website at the beginning of the year and among them are the other species."

"Thank you."

Grady grabbed the phone and began to read the document diagonally in order to move quickly to a section comprising a series of cards, each featuring the drawing of one of the species whose genome was used.

As he scrolled through the cards, he read the names of the animals aloud:

" _Majungasaurus_ , _Carnotaurus_ , _Giganotosaurus_ , _Megaraptor_ , _Proceratosaurus_ , _Tyrannosaurus_. Ah, _Kaprosuchus_ too! Unusual," Grady said before giving the phone back to its owner. "It's a hell of a cocktail that Wu made," he added, "and yet, I'm sure that this list far from being exhaustive. If his goal was to turn the I. rex into a show-off, he surely must have also added the DNA of modern animals with unique physical or behavioural features. It's undoubtedly a scientific achievement, but I still didn't get the real point of this creature worthy of Dr. Moreau. What's the next step? A rat crossed with a duck? A macaque with five asses? A Michael Jackson clone born from a llama?"

Hearing him listing all these far-fetched creations, Dearing could not help but chuckle.

"Stop with your nonsense ... In order to reinvigorate the interest of the public for this place, we must create new attractions, otherwise they would get bored."

"Yes, I understood, all the theme parks and zoos on the planet do this. But why a hybrid?"

"Masrani Global's executives and InGen's Board of Directors thought that genetic modifications would increase the _wow_ factor."

"We're talking about dinosaurs! They are already very "wow" enough."

They entered the empty entrance hall and took the wide stairs at its end, leading to a long corridor that run under the bleachers.

"According to our marketing experts, it will soon no longer be the case and the Indominus rex will allow us to stay on the center stage for a long time," she said with a smirk.

"The marketing experts ..." Grady repeated, grinning. "Just like political analysts, they are just a bunch of wankers who are showing off with their stats. And this name! Did special needs children found it?"

"We needed something scary but also easy to pronounce," Dearing justified, "You should hear a four-year-old trying to pronounce _Archaeornithomimus_."  
Once at the top of the stairs, they turned right and began to walk along the corridor.

"What do you think of _Albadrakon imperator_ or White emperor dragon? Not only it's classy but it is above all more thorough and the worst part is that it only took me two minutes to find this name where I presume that the term _Indominus_ is the result of several hours of meetings. Did the marketing guys had sharp lazinessitis by any chance?"

Taking an exit on their left, they passed under an arch and ended up outside in front of the first row of bleachers.

"Not bad," said Dearing, forced to admit that the name he found had some qualities, "but unfortunately, we cannot go backwards any longer at this point. The name _Indominus rex_ has been filed and anyone who will use it for commercial purposes without our consent will be sued."

Grady paused to look at the arena and sighed.

"So you patented it, wrapped in this nice gift wrap that is called marketing and now you are selling it..."

Dearing stopped a few steps from him and put her hand on the guardrail.

"Yes, that's what has been done here since the beginning. Do you have a problem with that?"

"The problem is that you regard life as something that can be traded in the same way as any industrial product and all of that is nothing but madness and stupidity. Biological patents opens the door to all sorts of abuses. Today, genetically modified and recreated extinct organisms are concerned but tomorrow, what else? Species that ensured the survival of mankind for thousands of years? With what right can a small group of individuals claim that a race or an entire variety belongs to them?"

To these questions, Dearing did not answer and she gesture to him so that they resume their walk while a profound silence reigned in the interior of the Coliseum, only disturbed by the sounds of the nearby construction works.

"To get her to sleep, which dose of tranquilizer was used?" Grady asked a few moments later while they climbed the steps leading to the top of the bleachers.

"Since its metabolism is very similar to the one of a tyrannosaur and that it weights ten tons, the veterinary team used the same dose as for a T. rex of that weight."

"Did they took into account her temper?"

Dearing slightly widened her eyes, surprised by this question.

"I guess but it doesn't change things much, right?" She asked uncertainly. "From my point of view, the I. rex has the same temper as all of the other large carnivores. Is it so important? If yes, why?"

"When you dose a tranquilizer, you have to think not only about the weight of the animal but also about its temper. For example if you inject the same dose to an elephant, a hippopotamus and a rhinoceros, you will get different reactions depending on the species..."

At the top of the bleachers, they turned to walk towards the surveillance room of the Coliseum. Near its door, Grady saw a woman in fatigues leaning back against the wall and smoking. He recognized Nataliya Darbinian.

"Where the elephant will be immobilized, the hippo will only be slowed down and the rhino will get angry. It's the same for dinosaurs and maybe the big carnivorous dinosaurs have all the same behavior in your eyes but the reality is quite different since while the T. rex is strongly attached to its territory and therefore will only leave it in case of extreme necessity, allosauroids such as _Allosaurus_ or _Metriacanthosaurus_ would not hesitate to hunt you on countless kilometers if they feel the need to and that pushes them to move away from their usual hunting grounds. What I meant is that you have a creature of which you don't know most of the behavior and which, if the rumors are true, has already showed herself so unpredictable that someone was sent to the hospital because of her while she was still young. I hope that new vet knows what he is doing because otherwise, we might have some surprises."

"That's exactly why you are to help us on this matter so stop being negative and be cooperative, please."

They stopped about twenty meters from the surveillance room door and Dearing looked at the time on her watch.

"I should go ... You will find Jonas and Lieutenant Brunet and some of his men inside. Try to send me your report before the New Year and if we don't see each other again by then, I wish you a Merry Christmas!"

"Merry Christmas to you too," Grady wished her back.

But she had already turned her heels and was walking fast towards the exit.

As he walked towards the door, Darbinian greeted him:

"Hi, Owen."

"Hi, Nat."

She threw down her cigarette butt and crushed it under her boot before going to stand in front of the doorway with her arms crossed, preventing Grady from going further.  
On her belt, there was a buzzer, a semi-automatic pistol and a dagger while a smartwatch was wrapped around the left wrist and she had a radio earpiece around her right ear. Her long black hair had been gathered back into a tight bun, as it was required for guards with long hair.

"Password?" She asked Grady in her most seductive Russian accent while looking at him straight into the eyes.

"Come on Nat, I don't need a password. Management sent me so be nice, move aside!"

He put his hand on Darbinian's shoulder and tried to push her but although he was taller and burlier than her, she did not yield and held her position firmly.  
Faced with the desperate efforts of Grady, who was desperately trying to get through, she laughed.

"Hey!" He protested in an amused tone.

"Darbinian! Stop this childish behaviour, _nom de Dious!_ " Ordered Brunet in his gruff voice from inside the room.

She complied and opened the door for Grady, letting him in before following him and closing the door behind her.  
The surveillance room was lit by two large parallel windows, one looking on the arena and the other on the cirque.  
On the side of the first, there was a series of consoles whose purpose was to control the effects involved in each animation and the gates between the holding room, the enclosure and the arena. In the back of the room, the guards had put their rifles against a series of lockers and nearby, small refrigerator was joined to a low furniture with a coffee maker on top.  
Grady saw not only Brunet and Roth but also Tian and Velasquez, who had been assigned to the achillobators paddock the previous day.  
While the first two were having breakfast at a square table not far from the refrigerator, with Roth eating bacon and beans, the other two were sitting in front of the consoles, watching CCTV footage while sipping coffees.

Grady came to greet his superior and the guards.

" _Comment allez-vous, mon ami?_ " He asked when he came to give Brunet a handshake.

" _Je vais bien, merci_. Your French is getting better!" Brunet said despite the fact that Grady spoke French with a noticeable US accent. "So, you are coming for _madame_?" He asked as he was spreading on a slice of bread some slimy cheese from the native region of the Frenchman and which name was unpronounceable for Grady.

"I didn't have the choice, you know how she is," he answered while he was going to make himself some coffee.

"Or because you are frustrated and thus obey her like if you were her dog," Darbinian teased him.

She was leaning against the lockers and staring at Grady inquisitively.

"I'm not frustrated! If you make reference to the rumors circulating about us, know that they are baseless."

"Owen, Owen, my sweet Owen ... I know men well and I know perfectly when they lie. Well, since I was talking about dogs a few moments ago, I'm going to say that you're like them: I'm sure that your tail is waggling whenever you see her coming or one talks about her. Tss… Say that you were sleeping with the enemy. We should mow you!"

"The enemy. Here you go with your fine words…"

During their talk, Brunet had closed his pot of cheese and got up to put it in the fridge.

"The term of enemy is not so exaggerated. Yesterday, Hamada talked to Dearing about the bunkers and not to be vulgar, she told him to scratch himself," Brunet told to Grady who was blowing on his coffee in order to cool it. "You'd think she's doing this on purpose…"

He put the pot down and closed the refrigerator door before coming back to sit at the table.

"Well, actually," he said, "I was talking about the other _madame_ , the one who is currently in the arms of Morpheus."

"The White Lady as some call her...," Grady said. "How is she?"

"Difficult to manage," Roth answered laconically. "Aggressive, capricious, sneaky, moody ..."

"Totally nuts, yeah," Brunet added between two bites. "A bit like one of my exes," he said in a low voice, referring to an old heated relationship had with a girl from his village when he was younger.

Once Roth and Brunet finished breakfast, they got up and headed for the door, inviting Grady to follow them.

"Velasquez, Tian. Come with us! Darbinian, stay here." Brunet ordered to his subordinates.

They nodded and after the others had left the room, Darbinian pulled a magazine from a drawer near the consoles and went to sit by them, crossing her legs on their edge, and began to read, giving from time to time a glance at the CCTV footage.


	24. Inspection

Grady, Roth and the three guards climbed down a staircase, took a dimly lit corridor and ended up before the service door of the enclosure, locked with a large padlock, of which the chief park keeper had the keys.  
He opened it, they crossed the threshold and entered in the cave of the Indominus, whose opening overlooked the interior of the cirque, allowing the occupant of the enclosure to dominate her territory and observe the people within the viewing gallery while lurking in the darkness.  
Although the opening was big enough to let a giant theropod over sixteen meters long and five meters high, daylight barely get inside the cavern and Roth had to turn on the lighting system so that they could see clearly.

Once the neons lights reached ground level, Grady saw bones scattered everywhere in an anarchic way and curious, he knelt beside one of them to investigate it. He touched with his fingers a series of holes puncturing what was an ox's thighbone.

"These bones have big traces of gnawing," he noticed.

"When a whole carcass is given to her, she will usually take it here to eat it quickly like she was a bulimic. Once she has devoured most of the meat, she gnaw the bones for hours," Roth told him. "And it's not the only thing but I will let Gilbert show you because I have to go see how the surgery is going. You will find me there later anyway."

As Grady was joining the guards near the large bay window that would have allowed visitors to observe the I. rex in her lair, the chief park keeper turned away from them and went in the opposite direction, towards the back of the cavern where there was a high reinforced door. Behind it, was the corridor connecting the cavern to the holding room where the veterinary team was about to perform surgery on the animal.

X

The veterinarian gently administered the anaesthetic, slowly depressing the plunger of the syringe which needle was stuck at the base of the Indominus neck, in the middle of the mosaic of thin scales that spread between two large fist-sized bulbous scales.  
The dinosaur was lying on her stomach and her body was stretched in the middle of a rectangular room with high concrete walls and of the size of a small warehouse. In it, the veterinary team had placed its medical equipment.  
Scanning lamps on wheels casted a uniform, shadow-free white light over the sleeping animal and acted as the main source of light in this dimly lit room while natural light got inside only through a series of rectangular windows on the upper part of the wall of the service hallway, separated from the holding room by a grating made of thick and close poles in reinforced steel. Inside the holding room, one had the impression of being a Lilliputian in an oversized prison cell.  
In addition to the vet, there were also his two assistants, wearing scrubs and a surgical masks like him, as well as Roth and some other keepers.

The latter were watching the operation from the service hallway and one could see concern in their eyes, like if it was their pet or a relative that was under surgery and not an animal that could have killed them with a single claw.  
Despite the dangerousness of some of the animals, the keepers of Jurassic World were very attached to them and concerning the animals born in the hatcheries, the custom was that the keeper who would take care of them had to be present when they hatched so that they could imprint on he or she in order to create a relationship based on trust because just like birds, dinosaurs considers the first being they see as their mother.  
However, the I. rex had not benefited from this custom because fearing that her immune system was too fragile due to her unusual design, Wu had preferred to reduce human contact to the bare minimum and thus, she was placed in isolation after her birth.

Once all the anaesthetic was injected, the vet carefully removed the needle before putting it on a stainless steel tray on top of a cart and he gestured to one of the assistants to pass him one of the ends of the surgical drape in order to lay it over the body of their patient, concealing almost all of her body except for the tip of the snout and a part of the tail.

"Steve? Can you check your heart rate?" The vet asked the vet to the assistant who had passed him an end of the sheet.

Steve walked around the I. rex in the direction of the grating and at the sight of her tail, a chill runs through the spine of the veterinary assistant as the end of the tail was entirely covered by enlarged keeled caudal spines.  
Steve stepped over it carefully, walked to the electrocardiogram on the floor and crouched down to look at the screen.

"Heartbeat is normal, Nick," he said.

"Good. Since her breathing is good too, I think we can start the surgery," The veterinarian said, staring at the tranquilized dinosaur.

He turned to the cart but, as he wanted to pick up a tool, he noticed that they had left it in their vehicle.

"I think we forgot the mini circular saw in the ambulance," he said, annoyed.

"I'll go fetch it!" Steve said before heading for a dimly lit corridor opposite of the grating and grabbing the keys of the vehicle on the cart.

"Toady…" The other assistant said to him in a whisper.

"I could have done it but never mind," the vet said once Steve disappeared in the corridor.

X

"These claw marks have always been there?" Grady asked, pointing to a series of huge scratches on an entire portion of the wall blocking the cirque's entrance.

"She sometimes sharpen her claws on it," Velasquez replied. "On some occasions, she does it while watching the guys in the watchtowers, like if she wanted to provoke them."

"Once, Gareth told her to stop but she responded by roaring at him and charging towards the tower in which he was," Tian told.

"He had nightmares for days and he almost throw in the towel. But despite his lack of self-assurance, Turner is a good soldier with a lot of potential and I had a quick word with Hamada so that he wouldn't be affected here anymore," Brunet added.

"On top of being a teenager, she is a rebellious one. Great…," Grady said in a jaded tone.

They left the wall to head towards the grove which, protected by the rocky walls of the cirque, had been spared by the whitish carpet of the fog that covered the entire area surrounding the complex.

X

"Something is wrong, Evy?" Nick asked to his other assistant, seeing that she had her nose in the health record of the Indominus and was giving pensive glances at their patient who was breathing loudly.

"She has gained a lot of weight in the last five months and her appetite has strongly increased. We could think that it is normal since she is growing but the data we have there are abnormally high compared to our expectations. Either we underestimated the physiological needs due to her growth, or there is something else. I could be wrong but..."

"Your feminine intuition tells you that our dear friend here is maybe pregnant?" The vet guessed. "Don't be ridiculous. I know that tonight it's Christmas but it's a dinosaur that we have here, not the Virgin Mary!"

"That's what Palo Alto's suits used to say before the survivors of the November 1994 expedition showed them eggshells coming from the ruins of Jurassic Park," Evangeline retorted.

"I am aware of all the problems caused by the inclusion of _Hyperolius viridiflavus_ ' DNA at the time, but Wu is far from being stupid and I doubt that he will do the same mistake twice. Moreover, even if he had done it again, the I. rex is alone in the world and therefore, she couldn't have been impregnated by anything."

"And if her eventual offspring was the result of a parthenogenetic process? The assistant suggested.

"Like in the case of that female Komodo dragon of the Chester Zoo (*)?"

"Exactly. It is not impossible that Wu has added DNA from a species that can reproduce through parthenogenesis without imagining the consequences and since he refuses to reveal the entire genomic composition, he leaves us in the dark," she theorised. "As if we were all Biosyn's or Grendel's lackeys… What I mean it's that we don't even know what we are working with!"

"Hey, relax! As you can see, she is peacefully asleep and I'm sure that the surgery will go smoothly. If you want to make clear in your mind, we can subject her to the sonogram in early January but in my humble opinion, you are worrying for nothing. The fact that this big girl eat all the time and therefore gain weight is not unusual for an animal living in captive environment since I knew a lion from a circus that had exactly the same problem. Ah, here he is!" Nick said when he saw Steve coming back from the corridor with the mini circular saw in hand.

X

As they were walking under the shade of the trees, Grady's attention turned to a small black tuft half hidden under the fallen leaves.  
He grabbed a small branch lying on the ground and used it to uncover the tuft and determine its nature. After the leaves were removed, he crouched next to it and grabbed it.

"You had no luck," he said to his find, a howler monkey hind leg.

"A monkey's leg," Tian remarked. "Why did she hunt it? It's a prey far too small for her,"

The four of them had concluded that the monkey was killed by the I. rex by looking at the size of the bite mark on the thigh.

"Indeed, but she didn't hunt for feeding herself but for fun," Grady said when he get up.

"Like a cat with flies," she compared.

"Exactly, they're only mere appetizers in her eyes. The more I know about her, the more she worries me," Grady admitted as they were leaving the grove, stepping into the open area between it and the viewing gallery. "We have an animal that has lived all her life between walls without other individuals to teach her or bring her some company and the only positive relationship she has is with the crane since she associates it with food," He said, pointing to the feeding crane. "Since she fully knows every corner of her enclosure, she began to get bored and compensate this by stuffing herself, provoke you and hunting everything that moves. I also heard that she is also abnormally intelligent for a theropod of this size. You are already aware of this but I have a bad feeling about this attraction because if, as expected, she is exposed to thousands of people who gesticulate and shout, she is likely to lose it and I dread to imagine what would happen in this case. Probably heart attacks and miscarriages in the "best" case if sensitive people and pregnant women are not prohibited to go to the attraction… Anyway, Claire has already made her decision and even if I put my best efforts in warning her, my opinion doesn't have a lot of weight compared to the mountain of dollars that the I. rex will bring to the park's and InGen's, vaults."

A brief silence followed.

"Do you want to see how the surgery is going?" Brunet proposed. "You could see how _mademoiselle_ looks like. We could resume the inspection after."

"Why not," Grady replied. "I'll follow you."

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) In 2006, Flora, a female Komodo dragon living in the Chester Zoo in England, laid eleven unfertilized eggs and seven of them hatched, all male.


	25. A Dragon's Awakening

Nick plugged the mini circular saw to an extension cable and then leaned over the square cut in the sheet at the base of the Indominus neck. Noticing that it was a little dark in the room, he ordered:

"Lamp!"

Evangeline brought one of the scialytic lamps closer and pointed it towards the square of skin where the vet was going to perform surgery.  
He turned on the mini saw and started cutting the thick skin of the dinosaur in the anesthetized area.

As the blade of the machine was cracking the scales, a sudden draught sent the sheets of paper on top of the cart flying all across the room.

"This damn ventilation!" He sighed.

"Don't cross your arms and wait, Steve! Go pick them up and make sure to put a paperweight!" Evy barked to her colleague who was a bit set back, waiting for some order.

"Fine, I'll do it! You don't have to yell at me like this!" He retorted.

Steve bent down to pick up the sheets one by one and once that was done, he piled them up on the cart and placed a stainless steel box over it so it could act as a paperweight.

"There is one that slipped under the drape, near the head," his colleague said.

Steve let out an inaudible sigh and then walked over to the head of the tranquilized dinosaur. He crouched down and when he put his head under the drape in order to search the last sheet, Steve was struck by the smell of rotting flesh that was emanating from the Indominus mouth, and this even if he was wearing his surgical mask.

"Ugh, your breath stinks!" He said, disgusted. "Hey, couldn't we take this occasion to clean her teeth? It's a fucking stench!"

"Since we already must hurry to put the implant, you are aware that we won't have the time for this," Nick replied.

He had reached the hypodermis thanks to the action of the saw and was now putting in the new implant.

"Yeah, another time," Steve said.

Under the maw of the I. rex, Steve saw the last sheet.

"Ah, found it!"

But when the assistant wanted to pick it up, he noticed that it was stuck and that if he pulled it too hard, he would tear it.  
In order to recover the sheet intact, Steve had no choice but to try to lift the jaws of the dinosaur.

"Come on, lift this maw for Uncle Steve" He implored while struggling to lift it.

"Drop it!" Nick told him. "We'll take it afterwards!"

"Just a second...," Steve said as he was pulling the sheet. "Here we go, I have it! In your ass, biatch!" The assistant said loudly and in a euphoric tone.

It was then that he heard a small, barely audible noise on his right, and turning his head in that direction, his blood froze. A blood red eye with an oval pupil was staring straight at him: She was awake.

"Get out of there Steve! You're too old for making castles with sheets and pillows," Evy told him.

But paralyzed by fear, the assistant did not dare to move and his heart was beating at a frantic pace.  
He would have screamed to warn his colleagues but no intelligible word could come out of his mouth and his limbs were shaking so much that eventually make him lose his balance.  
When she draw her upper lip back, she showed to Steve a row of sharp, serrated teeth which, as one was following the jaw in the direction of the throat, became smaller, narrower and more backwards curved. This made of the Indominus maw a trap that no one could escape, a trap that the dinosaur was planning to close on the veterinary assistant.  
While a rumble was coming from the monster's innards, Steve managed to pull himself together briefly and in a final effort, he screamed in a panicked voice:

"She's awake! Get out!"

Nick, who was stitching the skin of the dinosaur, dropped his tools and rushed towards the door while letting out a frightened scream.  
Some of the keepers who remained behind the grating ran to fetch some rifles while the others opened the door and were shouted to the veterinary team to get out.

As he was fleeing to the door within the grating, the vet hit something hard and rough that sent him flying several meters back and when he landed on the cold hard floor, he realized he was just hit by a tail swipe.  
Seeing that the situation was quickly worsening, one of the keepers rushed to a box fixed to the wall, opened its lid and firmly pressed on a large red button, triggering an alarm siren that was heard in the entire complex.

Meanwhile, Evy had rushed to help Steve, who was lying on his back with only the head and upper part of his torso out of the drape.  
She had barely begun to pull him towards her by the armpits that suddenly, the enormous head of the dinosaur moved under the drape, rose up a little and lifted the lower part of Steve's body.

A scream of pain filled the whole room and was followed by the sounds of bones being crunched and flesh being sliced.  
Blood spattered the drape, staining it with red, and Steve's scream faded until no sound came from his mouth while the force that was pulling him under the drape loosened, letting the assistant's body fall on Evy, who fell in her turn on her back.  
She realized with horror that Steve had been sliced at the waist, leaving viscera and shreds of flesh dragging on the floor while blood spurted through the severed arteries and veins, spilling onto the floor to form a spreading pool, and in shock, Evy screamed in terror.  
She dropped her now unconscious and dying colleague and panicked.  
As the remaining assistant was crying and trembling, the Indominus let out a low growl and began to get up, using her strong forelimbs as supports. Still attached to her body by electrode holders, the medical measuring devices scraped on the ground.

X

When the alert message appeared in large red letters on the main screen of the control room, discussions were cut short and Cruthers looked up at the said screen.

"What the hell?"

He tapped away briefly on his keyboard and a highlighted red dot appeared on the map of the island, at the spot where the Coliseum was located.  
Then, CCTV footage from the complex were broadcasted on the screen and the technician were horrified by what they saw on those coming from the holding room.

X

As the Indominus rose, she cast her shadow throughout the room and when she was standing between Evy and the daylight, the drape the dinosaur still had over her body took a dark colour and with her clawed hands of a cadaverous pallor, she evoked a gigantic spectral figure, even Death itself to the eyes of the veterinary assistant.  
With her height of five meters, the dinosaur was towering over Evy and the latter stepped back and desperately tried to get around the predator but she had seen her throwing Nick on the ground earlier and if she had wanted to run towards the door while avoiding this part of the animal's body, she would have thrown herself right into her maw.

The veterinarian regained consciousness and got up quickly despite the pain he was felling throughout his body but seeing that this nearest escape route was blocked by the dinosaur, he fled in the opposite direction, into the corridor through which Steve went earlier and which was now intermittently lit by the alarm's red lights that lined it.  
When the keepers who went fetch some rifles came back, he was already out of earshot.

Grady and the guards arrived in their turn, running down a hallway.  
Roth and another keeper, both carrying rifles, passed the grating's door and from their position, fired at the Indominus with electro-shocking ammo in order to distract her from the veterinary assistant.

"Get out!" The chief park keeper shouted at her.

He didn't noticed in time Grady passing by him to help Evy escape.  
When the predator, still blinded by the drape, felt a shock on the thigh, she grunted before giving a powerful tail swipe to the keepers, pushing them out of the room. Then, she turned abruptly and the medical equipment flew. In order to avoid being hit in the head by the electrocardiogram, Evy had to throw herself on the ground.  
While the Indominus was busy with the keepers, Grady ran to Evy to help her get up but it was then that he saw the dinosaur pushing the grating's door with the tip of her snout before giving it a violent head blow and when they wanted to reopen it, the keepers realized that it was blocked.

Looking at the door, Grady saw that the metal had deformed following the blow and he realized that she had locked them inside with her and that their only way out was the corridor that started at the other side of the room and which role was to allow the Indominus to go to the arena or the enclosure, the same one in which Nick had fled.  
Grady grabbed Evangeline by the arm and took her to the long corridor, inviting her to run as fast as she could and when she heard them run, the predator turned away from the gate and chased them.  
However the drape covering her body like a coat was interfering with her movements and if she didn't not get rid of it immediately, her preys would outrun her.  
The Indominus then bit one end of the drape, pulling on it with strength, then she tossed it to the ground before letting out a roar so deafening that all in the service corridor had to cover their ears.

Nick jumped when he heard her too. He had reached the end of the corridor and was desperately searching for the keys of the service door. He suddenly remembered that Steve had them when he went to fetch the mini-circular saw. Since the assistant didn't gave them back to him, they had to either on his corpse, either inside the belly of the I. rex.  
The veterinarian dared to look back and in the middle of an intermittence of the alarm's lights, he saw his colleague and Owen Grady running towards him.  
But during the intermittence that came just after, he saw the I. rex and terrified, he let out a scream and rushed on the control panel on the wall to his right, opened it and entered a code.

Once the code was validated, the wall in which the door was intertwined began to slide slowly leftwards, thus revealing itself to be a gate, of the same height as the corridor and by which the vehicles entered in the latter.  
As soon as the opening was wide enough to let his corpulent body pass, Nick rushed into it and ran outside, forgetting to start the closing process.

Seeing the daylight appearing at the end of the corridor in which the two fugitives and the Indominus went, Brunet adjusted his radio to the frequency of the control room while Velasquez and Tian were leaning over Roth and the second keeper thrown in the service corridor by the tail swipe.

X

" _Close that fucking gate now!_ " Shouted the voice of the Frenchman.

"There are still people inside!" Krill protested.

" _Do it or you will have more deaths on your conscience!_ "

Cruthers felt drops of sweat bead on his forehead while he was hesitating but with each second that passed, the likelihood of the I. rex escaping was increasing and nobody wanted that to happen.  
However, no one wanted people to be trapped with this monster either, and if he started the closing process of the gate, he would block the runaways path who would then have only the small door to escape, provided that they had the keys, but during the amount of time they will take to open it, the Indominus would catch up with them and the chief technician of the control room wouldn't like to be blamed for manslaughter.

Looking at his screen, he noticed that someone had started the closing process anyway since the door was sliding rightwards.

"Who did that?" Cruthers asked, yelling at his subordinates.

"The request has been sent from the surveillance room," one of them told him.

Cruthers looked at the CCTV footage of the surveillance room and he saw Darbinian, leaning over one of the consoles, her rifle over the shoulder.

She gave a brief glance at the camera before grabbing the rifles of her comrades and storming out of the room.

X

The Indominus being on their heels, Grady and Evy were running for their lives in the long corridor between them and the outside.

They had already gone through more than half of it when Grady heard the veterinary utter a muffled scream and, by glancing over his shoulder, he saw her falling on the beaten earth while firmly holding her throat with blood spurting between her fingers, like if it had been slit.  
He did not understood yet how the I. rex had been able to kill Evy while she was still several meters behind her but at the time, he did not have the time to think on the matter and he sprinted faster in order to not only suffer the same fate but especially to cross the gate on time.  
He heard the predator do the same and she, to avoid wasting time, stepped over Evy's body without paying any further attention to it.

Grady finally arrived at the gate and he rushed out of the corridor, reaching the outside. But as the gate was about to close, he heard it being obstructed and then the I. rex grunting in frustration as he was escaping her into a thick layer of fog.  
Since he didn't know if the gate was going to hold or not, he continued to run until he saw the shapes of two vehicles parked about thirty meters from the gate, the veterinary ambulance and a tipper truck.

Seeking the nearest and safest hiding place, Grady went under the tipper truck and he laid there on his stomach, hoping to escape the I. rex.  
The latter had managed to block the gate in its sliding and he heard the metal constituting it bend.  
Knowing that the I. rex was about to come out and that there was a good chance that she would pick up his scent on the parking lot and find him by tracking it, Grady pulled a knife out of his jacket and swiftly, he used it to cut the fuel pipe before using the latter like a shower head to spread gas over his clothes in order to cover his scent. Once it was done, he froze and prayed that his subterfuge would work.

The rolling sound of the gate ceased, leaving only those of the alarm sirens as the only sound in the vicinity in the middle of a profound silence.  
The I. rex finally stepped outside and began to tread on the gravel.

As she advanced, her breathing became more and more distinct to Grady's ears. He looked for her with apprehension during long seconds before a clawed three-toed foot rip the fog just a few meters from the vehicle.  
When he observed it, Grady noticed that the second toe (the inner one in the medial position) sported a dagger-like claw that was similar to the one the cassowary had on this same toe and which in the case of this famous Oceanian ratite, had a defensive purpose, capable of fatally wounding an adult man with a single kick and the fact that the Indominus had the same kind of weapon was enough to instil fear.

Despite having been chased by the beast, Grady had only brief glimpses of her and therefore, he had no idea how she exactly looked like and the few information he had about her, he had extracted them from the colleagues that were affected to her or the guards with whom he got along and which trusted him enough. Until the inauguration of the attraction, the appearance of the Indominus was supposed to be a secret.  
Alcohol helped to get some intel in most cases but the drink also had the effect of pushing them to give some outlandish descriptions that had left Grady sceptical.

From his hiding place, he glanced at the torso and the head of the animal, but the fog was so thick that he could not see anything beyond her muscular legs.  
She sniffed deeply and at the moment, he thought that the beast had found his scent but as she had almost reached the front of the truck, something near the ambulance produced a small muffled sound.

The I. rex froze for a few moments and took another direction in order to investigate the origin of the sound, moving quietly towards the other vehicle, heading to its front, which faced the gate.  
At the opposite end of the vehicle, the back leaned against the back doors, was a corpulent person in a surgery scrubs: Nick.

Unable to get into the ambulance and leave since he did not have the keys, the veterinarian was hiding there, waiting for the situation to evolve in the right way but because of the distance between him and Grady, the keeper wasn't able to tell him to stay calm without taking the risk of revealing his position to the I. rex and while he was watching the veterinarian, he had lost sight of the Indominus.  
With this fog, she could be anywhere since her white skin helped her to blend within it, like a Polar bear in the middle of a blizzard.

The I. rex reappeared shortly after, behind the ambulance, but all that Grady saw was the vague outlines of her back and her long tail that disappeared in the fog as well as the ominous spines of her dorsal ridge.  
The only audible sound was the one of slow and delicate steps on the gravels. She was moving with such stealth that it was frightening and almost supernatural for a predator of her size.  
The head was lowered behind the ambulance. The I. rex had probably found Nick's scent and she was following it, preparing to force the vet to come out of hiding in any second. He was doomed.

At the moment when Grady assumed that the head had reached the rear of the vehicle, the I. rex gave the latter a sudden and violent blow, and the ambulance tipped over before losing its balance and falling on its side in a matter of a few seconds.  
Nick jumped, began to stagger back, before falling on his back. As he screamed, the vague and monstrous shape of the mouth wide opened above him and closed on the veterinarian within the blink of an eye, silencing him immediately.  
Grady, who had helplessly witnessed the scene while looking at it with a certain curiosity towards the Indominus hunting technique that he later described as morbid, turned his head and closed his eyes. He heard the I. rex vigorously shake her prey like a dog would do to a toy, crushing bones and tearing flesh in the process.  
The keeper stayed laid under the truck, straight as a plank, and hoping for the I. rex to go away or that help arrives.

Suddenly, several gunshots were heard and Grady opened his eyes.  
He heard the I. rex interrupt her meal and let Nick's remains fall on the ground.  
Then, she let out a snarl and leaved.  
When he looked back in her direction, Grady had just enough time to see the back of her body and her tail disappear amidst the fog while she was running west, towards the jungle.  
Relieved, he crawled out of his hiding place by the opposite side of which he crawled in and he leaned against a wheel.

"Over here!" He shouted to manifest his presence.

"It's Owen!" Darbinian said in a deeply reassured tone.

Brunet, Darbinian, Velasquez, two keepers and some J-SEC officers rushed to him, and while the latter and the Costa Rican guard were carefully advancing with their weapons drawn towards the spot where Nick had been killed, Darbinian extended a hand to Grady and helped him getting up.

"You're okay?" She asked.

"Don't worry about me, I'm alive and well. Others weren't so lucky," he answered bitterly.

"Where did she go? Brunet questioned.

"She went in the jungle. I think she's heading west."

Brunet nodded gravely, then skirted the truck and went to stand next to Velasquez, near the J-SEC officers whose pistols were pointed towards the jungle, ready to fire if necessary.

The fog gradually losing its thickness, the edge of the jungle appeared more and more distinctly and while he was looking at the trees, on the lookout for any suspicious movement, the Frenchman activated his radio ear piece and contacted the rest of the garrison.

"Erin. Start the _Pegasus_ , we have job to do!"


	26. Code 19

A deathly silence had fallen on the control room.  
Most of the technicians were sitting by their working stations, speechless, like if they were having a collective hallucination, and their eyes were staring at the main screen.  
When the CCTV footage from the Coliseum were displayed on it, some of the technicians, including Krill, looked away to avoid the sight of the mauled bodies of those who the Indominus had killed during her escape.

While he was holding back a retching sensation, Cruthers ordered, with a shaky voice:

"Neil, alert the Guard if it's not already done!" He said to Harriman. "Alonso, contact the foreman of the work on the trench at once and tell them to leave immediately!" He asked to a Costa Rican sitting in the row behind Harriman's. "Vivian, broadcast a warning message in all of Sector Seven, it must be evacuated right now! As for me, I'm going to call Claire."

X

When Dearing received Cruthers' call, she almost had reached Burroughs and was about to cross one of the bridges spanning the Rio Iris.

The park director activated her hands-free kit and answered:

"Listen Lowery, It's supposed to be an off-day for me so it better be very important or I swear I will burn your mustache hairs with a lighter."

" _Claire ... We ... We have a code nineteen_ ," the chief technician stammered. Dearing, who feared that she had heard the information correctly, asked him to repeat.

" _We have a code nineteen! The I. rex escaped!_ " He shouted, on the verge of panicking.

She turned pale at this news and as she was preparing to take the road that led to Hammond Plaza in order to join her nephews for the day, she abruptly turned and took another road.

"I'm on my way!" She declared urgently while she was driving at full speed, heading for the Administration.


	27. BGCM

When the alarm siren resounded in the Grey Guard barracks, all the guards rushed at once to the armoury while a feminine synthetic voice was stating the level of alert and the sector concerned:

" _Warning! Scarlet Alert, Sector Seven._ " she kept repeating monotonously.

"Scarlet? That's the maximum level of alert..." Rahim said with a grim look on his face.

The park's alert system had five alert levels associated with a different colour: white, yellow, orange, red and scarlet; the scarlet alert level was the highest and associated to the presence of a certain threat in at least one of the seven sectors of the park and to which the garrison had to answer by deploying a significant part of its troops in the concerned sector.

"And it's for Sector Seven. I hope it's not the Sibo," Durant added in a worried voice while they were running side by side in the hallway leading to the locker room.

"If it's not the Sibo, it's the quetzals or the I. rex. Whatever it is, we are in deep trouble but I would prefer that it's the latter two."

They entered in the armoury where Sergeant Bellamy was giving a speech while putting her protective gear over her fatigues:

"I hope you've all said your prayers and went to the bathrooms because I don't want to have the smell of shit to reach my nostrils when we will face the White Lady. Yes, she just escaped," she told them. "Don't ask me how and why, I don't know so move your asses and grab your gear because she will not capture herself!"

The guards then ran to a series of closets in order to take their protective gear, including leather gloves, bracers, shoulder guards, a breastplate and shin guards, with most of them featuring small scales-like structures at their surface.

Once this gear had been put over their fatigues, the guards would have quite looked like any anti-riot or intervention squad if it wasn't for their helmet, which not only had a hemispherical cap and a neck guard but also featured cheek pieces that protected the mandibles and a spectacle guard around the eyes and the nose which formed a sort of a mask. Thus, the only facial parts uncovered by the helmet were the chin, the mouth and the cheeks but during some missions, it was not uncommon that the guards covered these parts with a balaclava, masking their identity.  
On this matter, the badge indicating the country of origin of the guards on the armours were concealed during these same missions, showing only the one featuring the five stars and the dragon.  
The helmet also had the specificity of being equipped with a small on-board camera, hidden within the brow of the small dragon's head above the spectacle guard and that could be turned on and off by pressing on a small button on the reptile's temple.

"Kosta! Alenko! Take the gear of Brunet, Darbinian and also those of Velasquez and Tian and bring them to the _Pegasus_ ," Bellamy ordered to the first guards who had finished putting their gear on.

When it was the case for Durant, she advanced towards a series of displays units that formed parallel rows and grabbed her weapons there.

During a Big Game Capture Mission, or BGCM in the Guard's jargon, members of the same platoon were divided into five classes, each with a specific role and equipment :  
There were the rangers, equipped with sniper rifles or compound bows and wearing a lighter protective gear than the other classes and no helmet as they were the snipers and the scouts of the Guard, acting with stealth, speed and precision; the fusiliers, the standard and most abundant troops of the organisation, who had rifles with electro-shocking ammo as their non-lethal weapon (assault rifles, light machine gun and even shotguns were the lethal ones) and which stepped in if the rangers couldn't neutralise the animal; the retiarii, armed with a net-gun and whose purpose was to limit the animal's offensive and defensive means by throwing a net on it; the hoplites, probably the most atypical of the guards since just like their namesake, they had spears and round shields (when the objective was to capture the animal, the spears were in fact long cattle prods but when it was to kill it, regular spears and even pikes in case of the larger ones were used), using the first to maintain the target in a specific area long enough to give the shooters a chance to aim successfully; and the field technicians or techs whose main purpose were to pilot the reconnaissance drones.  
While all the guards had a pistol and a knife as side weapons, the rangers also had a long-curved knife as a melee weapon if the situation degenerated whereas the fusiliers and the hoplites had a straight-bladed sabre of Eastern Asian inspiration which could be also be used for helping one making its way through the dense vegetation of the jungle.

As a fusilier, Durant grabbed a electroshocking-ammo rifle and a sabre, put the latter in its sheath and went into the garage, which entrance was at the exact opposite of the locker room's one. She reached the intervention vehicles of her platoon, a hummer and two Marauder. The three of them were painted in dark green and sported the Guard's emblem on their doors.  
Durant climbed on the back of one of the Marauder, where seven of her comrades were waiting for her and being the last to join the vehicle, she closed the rear dear before taking a seat.

After he had a look in the rear-view mirror and heard Durant closing the door, Drekanson told the driver to start the vehicle. He waited however that the hummer in which was Hamada left the garage first to take the helm of the convoy before following it down the road on a gentle slope, up to the gateway marking the entrance of the property given to the Guard on Nublar.

The latter was located in a long-sloped valley on the northern fringes of the Southern Plateau that faced the Long Lake and Mount Sibo.  
The long and narrow main building of the barrack had been built against a rocky outcrop with the upper floor being located at the same level of its top and the lower floor, the one where the armoury and the garage had been established, with its base while the building were the guards were accommodated, a set of two three-stories high apartment blocks, stood between the road and the eastern slopes of the valley. At the opposite, there was a grassy enclosure next to a low and long structure, the stables where Glenmore's platoon was busy.  
On the radio, the Scotsman had informed his colleagues that he and his men would be ready within five minutes, as were Lieutenant Laurence and the men she was taking in the _Pegasus_ , the garrison's helicopter, a _Bell UH-1D Iroquois_ that was still standing on its heliport on the roof of the main building.

The vehicles of the platoon to which Durant and Rahim belonged, Brunet's one, passed the gateway and first followed the road to the west, making them bypassing the employee village on the lake's shores and Masrani's hacienda on top of its hill. The road then climbed up to the crossroads near the bridge on the Rio Iris gorge.  
Once they saw the convoy, the J-SEC officers on guard duty there opened the bridge's gateway to let the guards pass through the Reserve, on the other side of the gorge.


	28. Control II

When the Mercedes parked in the parking lot of the administration building, its tires produced a screeching sound due to the brutality with which Dearing took the bend, almost threatening to scratch one of the other cars.  
The director quickly stepped out of her vehicle and began to walk at a quick pace towards the Administration's entrance.  
She pulled out her smartphone, dialled her assistant's number, and several long seconds passed before she picked up the phone.

" _Yes, Claire? What is it?_ " Asked Young's half-asleep voice.

"Zara, we have a big problem in the north..."

" _A problem? What kind of problem?_ "

As she just reached the lobby, Dearing waited until she was out of earshot of the receptionist and the security guard before answering to her assistant.

"A release of carbon dioxide more important than usual had been measured near one of the acidic lakes," she lied. "I have to supervise the evacuation of sector seven so it bothers me to ask you this but can you keep an eye on Zach and Gray? I had planned to bring them to the safari so can you wait for them there please?"

" _Of course. Let me just put my clothes on and I go there._ "

"Thank you very much Zara! I will call once the situation settled."

Before her assistant could say anything more, Dearing hung up and put the smartphone in her trouser pocket while she was crossing the atrium, hurrying up as the doors of the elevator were closing.  
She managed to slip inside in extremis and at the time, the other people inside wondered the reasons behind the park director's hurry and she had to make a major effort in order to not look panicked although the drops of sweat that were dripping on her forehead and flowing slowly towards her neck betrayed her stress.

When she entered the control room, the technicians fell silent and turned to stare at her as if they were waiting for her to deliver a speech describing the gravity of the situation, but instead, Dearing just walked to the guardrail behind Cruthers and Krill and fixed the real-time map of the island. On the latter, the seven sectors were delineated and the boundaries of Sector Seven appeared as a thick scarlet line while those of sectors four and six, corresponding respectively to the Reserve and the Misty Mounts, were only dotted lines that flickered from time to time, meaning that these sectors were still active but that vigilance was increased there.

"Where is it?" She asked.

"It has just crossed the trench and is heading towards the eastern slopes of Mount Sibo. It is four kilometers from the quetzal aviary," Krill answered.

"And since she can run at a speed of forty-eight kilometers per hour, she moves quickly. But the Grey Guard just sent a platoon to intercept her and I took the initiative to evacuate the entire northern sector," Cruthers added.

"I hope for you that you didn't shout from the rooftops that were was a big carnivore on the run ..." Dearing worried.

"No. In order to avoid spreading panic, I followed the protocol and a carbon dioxide alert was launched," he told her. "We might need to thing about changing it one of these days since in movies, they also launch a gas alert when a neighbourhood needs to be evacuate whereas the danger is completely different."

"You informed Mr. Masrani?" The director questioned them.

"Not yet, but I'm going to do it," Krill said.

Dearing's eyes widened when she saw her grabbing the phone on her desk and beginning to enter Masrani's residence number.

"Put this phone down, Vivian!" She ordered suddenly in an authoritarian tone.

"But the protocol says that..." Krill mumbled.

"I know the protocols," interrupted her superior. "For now, I prefer to not tell him about this. You know how he is with his habit of sticking his nose everywhere whenever there is an issue? I guess so and that's why I wouldn't like to have him under my feet."

Reluctantly, Krill nodded and put the handset down, but Cruthers did not seem to agree.

"In this case, I hope that you will assume your non respect of the protocol and that you will not blame us when he will told you off for leaving him in the dark," he objected.

"I'm not stupid," Dearing said sharply. "Masrani will be informed but only when we will have regained control of the situation and not before, understood?"

"If we regain control. Let's imagine that we manage to capture the I. rex without a fuss, you will still have to explain the deaths of three people and Roth's hospitalization. What are you going to tell their families, huh?" He asked in an insistent tone.

"Right now, I don't know but Lowery, just a thing. If you plan to preach me for the rest of the day instead of focusing on your job, I think I will carry out my threat from earlier once this mess will be settled. So if you care about your damn hipster moustache, just shut up and stop getting on my nerves! Thank you!"

"You're the boss," he muttered in a sigh.

He glanced briefly over his shoulder and saw that Dearing's hands were as firmly gripped around the railing as talons around a branch while her eyes were looking on Krill's screen.  
Among the CCTV footage that were scrolling along the side edges of the screen, Dearing was looking for those from the monorail station under Hammond Plaza where her nephews were supposed to wait for her. When a visual of the station appeared, she saw only a swarm of visitors waiting impatiently in front of the vehicle's doors.  
When they opened, Dearing thought she recognized a small head with curly brown hair, but the distance to the screen and the size of the window prevented her from making sure it was Gray or not.

Behind Harriman's row, Alonso Quintero had just picked up his phone and was talking in Spanish with his interlocutor. His voice showed signs of anxiety, he received some bad news.

" _Quién? Juan de la Roya y Elias Escarcéga?"_ He asked.

"What is it Alonso?" The director inquired.

"It's the foreman. Two of the workers are missing," he answered gravely. "They were doing clearing work west of the arena during the escape."

Dearing turned to the liaison technician.

"Neil, inform the guards that their mission hava a new objective now. They must find these workers and rescue them," she ordered. "I will not let anyone else die today!"

"Yes ma'am!"


	29. The Safari Village

His head resting on his fist, Gray stared blankly at the landscape from the monorail in which he and his brother were sitting.  
No matter her promises, their aunt didn't joined them at the monorail station and when it arrived, both of the brothers had decided to go in the vehicle in order to avoid waiting another twenty minutes.  
They were now travelling at a speed of more than sixty kilometres per hour along the slopes of the Western Cordillera, a mountain range running along most of the western coast of the island, acting as natural barrier between it and the interior.

"Hey Gray, what's up?" Zach asked, noticing his brother's look.

"Nothing."

"I'm asking you that because you have not stopped to sulk since we got in the monorail. You know, for the number of times that you have harassed mom and dad to come here, they wouldn't like to know that you spent a part of the trip sulking. It's because of Claire? Don't worry about that. She probably had a small setback that prevented her from joining us in time, nothing too bad if you want my opinion."

"Don't you think she would have already told us? I'm sure she forgot us."

Their discussion was interrupted by the jingle that preceded any announcement in the monorail's speakers and a woman voice declared:

" _Dear visitors, your attention please! Due to technical difficulties, the Hot Springs and the Quetzalcoatlus Cliff are closed and therefore, the Safari Village will be the terminus of this monorail. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding._ "

The news raised some protesting exclamations from the visitors that had planned to go there and leaved them disappointed and annoyed while the long thatched roof of the safari village's monorail station began to appear at a hilltop in front of them.

"We're almost there. I bet you she's already waiting for us by the safari," Zach declared.

Once the monorail stopped at said station, its doors opened and all the passengers got out while other visitors got in.  
The Mitchells left the station and took a path that winded through the vegetation before reaching the village's entrance, marked by a life-size wooden sculpture of two large duckbill dinosaurs.

 _Edmontosaurs or shantungosaurs_ , Gray thought after seeing their size and physical features.

They were in the middle of a fight and visitors passed beneath them, in awe by the realism and the illusion of movement that the sculpture was giving. The animals were standing on their hind legs, clashing against each other with the sheer bulk of their bodies, kicking with their front legs and one even trying to bite the other on the neck.

Once the sculpture was behind them, the visitors entered in the village, separated of the surrounding jungle by a palisade, and ended on a surface of beaten earth acting as a plaza and where stalls were standing. By those, employees were selling refreshments, snacks but also works from Costa Rican craftsmanship and this, combined to the architecture of the few buildings within the village that featured thatched roofs and walls that looked like to be made of clay, gave the impression to the guests of really being in a remote small town in some far-away tropical country.

However, most visitors did not stop and crossed the plaza to walk towards an observation platform oriented towards Mount Sibo and overhanging gently sloping meadows in the centre of which was a waterhole.  
Some stopped at the platform to take pictures of the animals quenching their thirst at the latter, but their attention quickly turned to a hot air balloon that rose from behind the mountains of the Embrace, passing in front of the volcano while flying over the jungle which seemed to extend to the horizon and hide many wonders and secrets given its size.

Zach and Gray followed the signs indicating the direction to take to join the attraction _Expedition: Lost World_ , located a hundred meters east of the village, and while they strolled along a sloping alley, Zach's cell phone vibrated in his pocket.

"Gray? Claire texted me," he announced to his brother after taking out his phone. "She has an urgent issue to resolve and she won't be able to be with us today. She sent Zara to join us in front of the safari."

"She surely has an urgent issue..." Gray sighed.

"A job like hers comes with great responsibilities and she can't get away like this."

"But she had promised us! I have the impression that she doesn't care about us and that's why she sent her flunky to watch us."

"Watch your language, you little shit!" His brother reprimanded. "The flunky like you says, has a name, Zara. We met in a tavern last night and she's actually pretty nice."

"You say that because she interests you. I saw you staring at her ass yesterday."

"Gray, don't be ridiculous... Not only she is engaged but she is also like almost fifteen years older than me."

"Apparently, age difference doesn't bother you that much because mom told me that she surprised you once hitting on one of her colleagues."

"It was nothing serious, it was more for fun," the elder said casually after letting out a nervous laugh. "It's called flirting, it's like a game if you want. You'll understand when you'll be older…"

"Stop saying that. It looks like you're trying to act like dad," Gray complained.

"Since you hardly see him, someone needs to explain you the things of life."

They arrived at a junction with two paths.  
The one on their left led to _Expedition: Lost World_ , and the one on their right led to the _Giants Grove_ , a small forest of araucarias where walkways winded between the trees above ground level, allowing the visitors to have close encounters with many large herbivorous dinosaurs, especially the sauropods, and even feed some of them with cycad leaves or branches.  
However, the Mitchells didn't intended to go the Giants Grove yet and they took the path to the left and after a turn, they saw a small building with a pointed multi-layered thatched roof. Near it, a jagged big rock covered with vines and mosses sported the name of the attraction.  
As they approached the building, their attention was captured by the display screen just above the entrance.

 **Estimated waiting time:**

40 minutes

"Forty minutes. Shit..." Zach muttered.

"That's why we should have come earlier but hey since we had to wait for Claire..." Gray said while rolling his eyes. "Let's go now because it's gonna be worse in the middle of the day."

"And about Zara? We have to wait for her here, I recall you!"

"Don't tell me that you don't need her to go in this attraction?" Gray asked sarcastically. "She can wait for us in the village at worst. Come!"

"Yeah, whatever!" Zach sighed before joining his brother who didn't even wait for him to enter the queue, which entrance was in the building with the pointed roof.

They waited there for long minutes, unaware of the operation that was being prepared just a few kilometres away and on which depended the safety of all visitors.


	30. San Fernandez

" _Gilbert, do you have any news about the workers?_ " Hamada asked in Brunet's ear piece.

After evacuating the Coliseum, he and Darbinian had gone to the undergrowth west of the construction site to search the missing workers.  
When they arrived, they had found their abandoned tools on the floor and an iPod with earphones attached to it and still playing some songs in Spanish from a Costa Rican group. Its owner had heard nothing.

"We found one of them, a leg…," Brunet replied.

He watched Darbinian put the severed leg in a plastic bag. Midges were flying around it.

"Concerning the other, we found a series of footprints leading to the west," he added, speaking of the traces in front of him.

" _One of them is still alive but he will not be able to outrun the I. rex forever_ ," Hamada said. " _We must act quickly or he will be doomed. Meet us at the clearing_."

"Heard. Brunet, over."

X

Aboard his hummer, Hamada took the radio in order to brief his men before they arrive on site.

In each of the three vehicles, the guards listened attentively.

" _Your attention please_ ," he said seriously. " _I inform you that we will arrive at the coordinates in less than four minutes and thirty seconds. Given the nature of our objective, I would like to remind you of some of the points of the strategy that was established in the eventuality of this day. You all know what the Indominus is capable of so keep your distance from her at all costs. If she charges, it will be up to the hoplites to act and occupy her while the shooters will carry out a tactical retreat. Remember that the skin of her back and sides is too thick for our weapons and so you must aims for the belly or the neck, her weak spots_."

Hamada paused and asked his men:

" _Guards! What is our motto?_ "

"Cave Dracones!" They all clamoured loudly to encourage each other.

" _Beware the dragons, yes. Brace yourselves!_ "

His speech finished, Hamada turned off the radio while the convoy was driving along a dirt road that led towards Mount Sibo.

X

In the Marauder at the back, Durant was nervously running his fingers over his rifle and seeing that, Baker, who was whistling a martial air while tapping on his knees as if he mimed percussion, asked her in a teasing tone:

"So Durant, you're freaking out for your first BGCM?"

"Stop it, I have the impression of being my grandfather before the Normandy landings."

"Ah it's one thing to slaughter aliens, orcs or barbarians in a video game, it's another to go out and face a beast that can swallow you whole in a blink of an eye," said Maleko Cole, a Hawaiian of more than one meter and ninety meters high and which was sitting next to her.

Due to his size and his musculature, he looked like a real giant in armour, which gave him a very intimidating look although he was someone known for his kindness.

"E.T.A two minutes," announced the driver.

"Tonight, we will celebrate Christmas Eve in Hell!" Baker said, nervously giggling.

X

The convoy continued on the bumpy track before leaving it to go park in a small clearing were Brunet and Darbinian, standing next to their jeep, were adjusting their gear.  
As soon as the vehicles stopped, two dozen guards disembarked to regroup while Rahim and another took out two metal suitcases from the Hummer's boot and opened them in the middle of the clearing.  
The suitcases featured the logo of _Aerospace Dynamix_ , Masrani Global's aeronautics subsidiary in Toulouse, and each contained two _Farfadet_ micro-drones, the size of a plate and equipped with panoramic cameras that could see in the infrared spectrum.

" _According to the information transmitted by the implant, the I. rex stopped ten minutes ago three hundred meters north of your position, in the middle of San Fernandez, and she would still be there_ ," Harriman told them on the radio.

"Heard," Hamada replied. "Deploy the drones!"

Using their remotes, the techs took off the farfadets and the drones crossed the clearing before entering the jungle silently. They were followed by the rangers, wearing in all weathers capes with hoods and balaclavas covering their mouth and nose. The rangers were led by Darbinian and numbered four out of the twenty-five guards in the clearing.  
They barely made a few steps inside the dense vegetation that they disappeared from the sight of their comrades.  
Like shadows, they moved silently under the foliage lulled by birds and bugs songs and scanned their surroundings while doing so in addition to look at their smartwatch from time to time to make sure that they were moving to the right direction.  
Accompanying the rest of the guards who followed the rangers from a respectable distance, the techs were busy piloting the drones that transmitted the footage taken by their cameras to the touch screen of the remote control.

When the drones arrived near a cracked stone wall covered by creepers, they scattered to describe a perimeter around the ruins of what was once a mining town, San Fernandez, destroyed more than four centuries earlier during the Mount Sibo's eruption of the year 1580.

Named in honour of the navigator Diego Fernandez who discovered Isla Nublar in 1525, San Fernandez was founded in 1568 in order to increase and spread Spaniard influence along the Pacific coast of the New World.  
But it was the discovery of gemstones on the island by prospectors in the middle of the century that had particularly prompted New Spain to take an interest in the island and the wildest rumours being commonplace at the time, many in Havana believed that on Isla Nublar, sapphires, rubies or diamonds could be found directly on the ground.  
Following the prospectors indications and with the blessing and support of the viceroy, the settlers founded San Fernandez at the foot of Mount Sibo, where the precious stones had been found and mines were dug here and there in the north of the island.

However the small colony stagnated during the first years of its existence because of the mines low yield. A lack of manpower was deplored there and to overcome this problem, the governor of San Fernandez charged conquistadors to deport hundreds of Bribri from the mainland so that they can work as slaves in the mines or the fields.  
Thanks to the fruit of their labour, the productivity of the mines increased and San Fernandez entered in an era of prosperity but consumed by greed, the governor and the conquistadors ordered to the miners to dig deeper and deeper under the volcano, much to the prejudice of the latter who worked in inhuman conditions and lost many of theirs to exhaustion or crumblings provoked by tremors.  
But for the governor, such was the price of prosperity and great was his surprise when the earth shook and fire fell from the sky twelve years after the founding of the colony. **  
**As the settlers fled the burning town to reach the coast and the few ships that were moored there, the slaves of the mines took advantage of the eruption to break their chains and flee southward, releasing on the way their kin from the farms in the heart of the island before disappearing into the jungle.  
The former slaves gathered in a new tribe, the Tun-Si or Water Men in their language in reference to their origin of deportee brought from the ocean, and founded a village on the shore of a small lake on top of the Southern Plateau. They spent the next centuries living humbly from hunting, gathering, fishing, subsistence and goat farming (those were retrieved from the abandoned Spaniard farms).

As for San Fernandez, its story became legend. The legend became myth. For more than four hundred years, no one heard of San Fernandez until by accident, an historian of the University of Havana stumbled across archived documents stored at the bottom of a drawer and decided to study them. The documents were mentioning the exact quantity of ships sent by the viceroy to the cloud island in the middle of the ocean east of Costa Rica. The historian told about his discovery to the Cuban Ministry of Culture, who then informed its Costa Rican counterpart.  
However, since the discovery was made in the early 2000s, they were unable to send a joint archaeology expedition to Isla Nublar as rumours of a "war under the leaves" between InGen's troops and feral dinosaurs had reached various governments of Central America and the Caribbean, and they had to wait for the opening of Jurassic World and the declassification of the old restricted area to revive this expedition project.  
Once the ruins of San Fernandez were found in the location indicated by the archival documents, Jurassic World naturally proposed to the Costa Rican Ministry of Culture a partnership consisting of the creation of a discovery trail on the outskirts of the ruins but while its implementation was to start in early 2018, the tragic events of Christmas 2017 cut short this project.

The city was spreading over a little less than ten hectares and organized according to a grid pattern in the centre of which was the central square, bordered on one side by a Romanesque church and the town hall on the other but over time, the traces of this organisation had faded as the jungle had reclaimed the area and conquered the town whose streets were now covered with weeds and other low plants while many walls had collapsed because of the trees that even grew sometimes inside the houses.

When the rangers arrived at proximity of the town's entrance, they stopped and Darbinian looked at her smartwatch.  
The cursor on the screen pointed towards the church of which only the load-bearing walls and one half of the bell tower remained.

"The signal comes from inside the church. This coward is probably hiding there," she said in a low voice.

She saw one of the drones flying towards the building and she signed to her companions to deploy themselves near the church.  
The other rangers nodded and then entered into the town before scattering in the backyards and joining trunks or walls behind which they took cover and kept an eye in the direction of a breach opening on the choir.  
Despite the fact that the roof collapsed, the daylight had difficulty to reach the interior of the church because of the trees all around and even inside the building, forming a vegetal cathedral above the nave and the transept.

X

"Take some height to enter by the roof," Brunet suggested over Rahim's shoulder.

The drone ascended and approached the gaping hole where the roof once stood but when Hamada saw a surprised look on Rahim's face as soon as he had a visual of the interior of the church, he asked him:

"What is it?"

"I'm not sure but..."

Hamada did not let him finish his sentence and peered over the screen. Between the walls of the church, there was only piles of rubble surrounded by bushes and ferns. The Indominus wasn't there.

"There is a margin of error of how many meters?"

"Ten, captain," Rahim reminded him. "But there is nothing around the church either."

"Yes, Harriman. Are you sure you sent us to the right coordinates?" Brunet asked to their liaison technician with a hint of sarcasm.

" _Normally yes. If you enter the church, you should see it_ ," Harriman answered.

"Let's go," Hamada ordered. "We will make this all clear."

Once at the rim of the ruined town, he turned to his men and give them orders:

"Leif, Patience. Take half a dozen men each to search the ruins. Gilbert and the others, follow me to the church."

They complied and Hamada's group moved towards the church, on watch.  
They were joined on the way by Darbinian who shook her head when she was asked if she had seen any traces of the I. rex.  
The group entered the church through the breach and began to search the building for any signs.

They quickly noticed that there was claw marks on the altar while another breach stood where the porch was before. The guards deduced that the Indominus had entered inside the church through the breach near the choir, crossed the nave and left by the porch, destroying what was left of it on the way.

"Why did she go there? Baker wondered. "I mean why go in a hiding place that's almost too small for her if it is to leave it immediately by creating another breach, taking the risk of injuring herself. Nothing was chasing her to my knowledge."

"The worker," Darbinian reminded him. "She was not chased, she was chasing."

"Do you think the worker went here?" Someone asked her.

"I'm not sure but it's a plausible hypothesis," she answered before her attention was drawn to something lying among the rubble around the porch. "Captain, I think you would like to have a look on this!"

Hamada went by the ranger and saw why she called him, a piece of bloody flesh lying amidst blocks of stone and in which was embedded a cylindrical object the size of an index finger and featuring a microchip and an antenna coil: The tracking implant.  
Hamada froze during a moment and then knelt to grab the piece of flesh.

"I'm afraid that we will have to track her in the old way," he said.

"She clawed it out? This is not normal…" Durant said with concern.

"Why, _cheerleader_? If you noticed that one put something weird in your body, would you not try to get rid of it even if you have no idea about what it is?" Darbinian asked her.

"In the meantime, we are quite screwed! She was probably already running away when we arrived at the clearing," Brunet mumbled.

In order to separate the implant from the flesh, Hamada unsheathed his hunting dagger and dived the blade under the implant before pressing on the handle and using the dagger as a lever.  
Once the implant was released, he put it in one of his pockets but when he got up, he surprised Durant gazing upon his dagger.

Indeed, its handle had the peculiarity of being a dinosaur tooth, the one of a big carnivore given its size and shape, which was sculpted and fixed to the blade with leather lashes. But what attracted Durant's eyes were the Kanji carved with care on the enamel and whose meaning were unknown to her.  
However, Durant saw that her captain was embarrassed by the fact that she was looking at the dagger almost indiscreetly and he put it back into its sheath, leaving her with questions that burned her lips but didn't dare to ask directly, fearing to evoke eventual bad memories associated with the dagger.

"Katashi?" Drekanson hailed as we was coming towards to the church after searching the area. "We found some footprints that goes westward."

"Those of the I. rex? The captain asked while heading for the exit.

"Yes but not only hers. There is also what I think are those of the worker," Drekanson replied.

The guards came out of the church and followed Drekanson to a series of tracks in the middle of the square next to which the others had gathered.  
They recognized the three-toed ones of the Indominus but also working shoes prints with some of the latter partially or completely covered by those of the dinosaur.

"They are overlapping," Hamada noticed. "He may still be alive. Hurry up!"

They crossed the rest of the square, running past a dried-up fountain, before bypassing the town hall and climbing a rocky slope which was in fact a lava flow that solidified after having engulfed a part of the town, including half of the town hall.

"Erin? Did you see something leaving the jungle?" Brunet asked to the pilot.

" _Negative. And there is a real pea soup on the Sibo and Little Gorgoroth_ ," Laurence told them, " _it's impossible to see anything from the air. I've never seen anything like this and I'm afraid that we must count on the drones and our eyes to find her._ "

One of the drones, which camera had been set up in the infrared mode on the meanwhile, was at the head of the group, searching for residual pockets of heat left by the workers or the Indominus feet.  
As they progressed in an area of bushes and shrubs growing on the basalt, the guards entered an area where the fog was still present and the more they advanced towards the volcano, the thicker it became while the vegetation became more and more sparse and stunted.

"Don't tell me that they went to this cursed place...," Brunet mumbled when they realized that the tracks were leading outside the jungle, to a place where the ground was bare and made of black rocks.

Following the drone, they ended up on a promontory overlooking a lunar landscape stretching over several square kilometers on the volcano's slopes and foot. Amidst a cloud of steam and sulphur, they saw that it was dotted with craters and mounds.

"Shit, she went into Little Gorgoroth…" Durant said in a low voice.

"The Mother's Wrath as the Tun-Si call it," Bellamy added.

"Tracking the Indominus with these conditions in the middle of this barren wasteland, riddled with ash and dust and where the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume… It is folly…" Baker said.

"Wait, the air is poisoned there? Nobody told me to take a gas mask!" Durant worried.

"How can you be so naive _cheerleader_?!" Darbinian told her. "Percy is saying bullshit as usual, but that being said, a gas mask might be useful because of the sulphur fumes that releases a rotting-eggs like smell."

"With each second that passes, the already low chances of survival of the worker dwindles, let's move!" Hamada commanded.

Forming a line, the guards descended the ridge into lowest parts of Little Gorgoroth and followed the drone that was flying close to the ground in front of Hamada at the head of the line. Dread could be read on his face and those of his men.


	31. Forsaken

Out of breath and his heart pounding, Elias Escarcéga was running for his life, almost blind because of the fog, fleeing the great demon who devoured his colleagues Juan before his eyes.

They had heard neither the alarm's sirens of the Coliseum, nor the calls of their foreman and it's when he went to ask Juan a machete that Escarcéga witnessed a horrifying, almost supernatural scene.  
Because of the panic, he couldn't remembered what happened exactly but he would have sworn that the demon had appeared suddenly behind Juan, like a ghost.  
Having seen Elias point something behind him, Juan barely had the time to drop his strimmer that he had disappeared inside the monster's maw.

Of a superstitious nature, Escarcéga had believed that it was some spirit of the Tun-Si mythology, summoned to punish them for desecrating the lands around the volcano.  
When he had hid in the church, he could had a glimpse of the demon.

It looked like a dinosaur but was different from those that the worker had seen in the park or in his son's children's books.  
Some gave him goose bumps but the demon was scarier than any of them and Escarcéga wondered that if it wasn't metamorphic, able to take the shape of things that scared him since dinosaurs could be dangerous. But dinosaurs were only animals, not being with supernatural abilities.

Fortunately, Escarcéga was a sportsman and therefore, he had managed a great deal of stamina to escape the demon and distance him for several tens of minutes.  
But with every moment spent running, he got more tired and ended up losing speed while the demon kept the same pace as before and it didn't even seemed to be at its maximum speed, as if pursuing him was nothing but a game.  
However, sooner or later, the demon would get bored and it was perfectly able to catch up with Escarcéga, who had to find a hiding place in order to rest, even for a few minutes, otherwise he would collapse against the rocks in the open.

Hearing the demon getting closer, Escarcéga looked for this hiding place but around him, everything was but rock and fog.  
However, he saw that the ground seemed to be sloping in front of him and without thinking, he hurtled it down before hiding behind a large rock below. The worker scanned the surroundings and realized that he was in the bottom of a crater with walls too steep to be climbed quickly. A shiver ran through his back at the idea he threw himself in a trap where the demon could easily come and catch him.  
Long seconds passed before it betrayed its presence with a short hoarse breath and Escarcéga heard it stop at the crater's rim.

Petrified and curled up on himself, he did not dare to even cast a glance over the rock out of fear of showing his presence and he was holding his shaking legs firmly against his chest.  
Rocks tumbled down from the rim and when those collide with the large one behind which he was hidden, Escarcéga jumped and then felt his overalls getting soaked with some hot liquid at the level of his crotch. He pissed on himself.  
The smell of urine quickly reeked and a few moments later, the demon sniffed carefully.  
Aware that it was only a matter of seconds before it will force him out of his hiding, Escarcéga took the cross around his neck and inaudibly whispered prayers while tears were running down his cheeks. Once his prayers were done, he kissed the cross, closed his eyes and waited.

But to his surprise, he heard the monster walk away and as soon as its footsteps were lost in the distance, the worker gave a brief look over the rock and his eyes scanned the rim of the crater. The demon hadn't noticed his presence.  
He waited for a few moments, then, seeing and hearing nothing, he took the risk to leave his hiding place and headed for the slope opposite the rock.

As he climbed on all fours, he noticed that the rock was very friable and a section of the wall crumbled under his weight and a cascade of pebbles tumbled down, dragging Escarcéga a few meters back.  
Panic-stricken, he resumed his climbing, redoubling his efforts and panting, he reached the edge and passed his leg over it.  
His ankylosed limbs prevented him from getting up immediately, they were hurting him, but he had to, otherwise death was certain since the noise created by the tumbling rocks and pebbles could very well have been heard by the demon who could be anywhere.  
As he was about to get up, he felt a drop on his wrist and looking at it, he realized with stupor that it was a drop of blood.

He glanced at it carefully and saw another land close to the first before slipping in the opposite direction. He raised his head but saw nothing except the whiteness of the fog.

 _It's raining blood now? What sorcery is this?_ He wondered.

Feeling that something was off, Escarcéga definitely thought of getting up but during his attempt, he saw a giant clawed hand appear in front of him and crack the fog before pinning him to the ground.  
His face pressed against the rocks, the worker could only make a half-muffled scream as the hand held him firmly enough to immobilise him but also loose enough to let him breath and not break his bones.  
Raising his eyes, he saw a dewlap of red scaly skin hanging under the lower jaw and the neck of a great biped creature while there was nothing there a few seconds earlier.

The demon having him at its mercy, Escarcéga realized that his time had come and like Juan, he was going to be devoured, in the middle of this sinister place, and all he could do was cry and beseech the Lord to grant him a quick and painless death.  
He felt something sticky wrapping around his leg like a tentacle and then the hand loosened its grip to let the slimy organ drag him on the rock before pulling him up.  
Escarcéga frantically gesticulated in order to free himself from the thing while he was upside down but as he was doing so, the cross slipped from his neck and helpless, he saw it fall to the ground.  
He felt the warm breath of the demon envelop him and his legs hit something hard and fleshy, the jaws of the monster. His legs, then his abdomen entered the wet and nauseating mouth.  
During the process, Escarcéga felt his abdomen scrape on the sharp teeth of the demon, raising a sharp pain.  
He wanted to scream but exhausted, he fainted as the jaws closed around him leaving only his head and arms dangling outside while the tips of the teeth sank slightly into his arms and on the upper part of his chest, like nails to which only small hammer blows were given.


	32. Expedition: Lost World

Zach and Gray were slowly making their way along the queue, lulled by a tribal music featuring drums and chants that invited the visitors to escape and adventure.

The line, bounded by a railing made of stakes of wood, zigzagged in the middle of the tropical vegetation under a thatched canopy that sheltered people from sun or rain.  
While Gray was reading with interest the information written on the educational panels along the queue, providing information on the biology and ecology of the species living in the Reserve, Zach was playing on his cell phone, paying little attention to what was going around him.  
Suddenly, a notification appeared in the middle of the screen.  
" _You received a new message_ " was written and Zach pressed on "open" to view the message.  
It was from Young and she was asking him where they were.

He answered her and a few seconds later, he received a new message from her, telling them that she was going to wait for them at Gertie's Safari Bar and Restaurant.

 _They serve delicious burgers_ , she added.

While texting his aunt's assistant, he listened to the conversation of a group of four young people in front of him.

"Hey, you think we'll see Bucephalus?" A young auburn-haired woman asked to one of her friends.

"Buce who?" One of them said, a muscled and tanned man with short blond hairs.

"A badass big duckbill who fought against the former dominant male of his herd and won," clarified a third, a man with long curly brown hair. "You never saw that video on Youtube? The one with the audio excerpt from _300_ over it?"

"Oh yes, it reminds me of something actually. Didn't you share a meme on Facebook with his head?"

"Yes, he's a real web star!" The curly one confirmed.

"And he is so handsome…," the auburn-haired woman added.

The young woman was reminding Zach some of his friends that went horse riding and talked about the horses of their school in the same manner as boys.  
However, he didn't know what this Bucephalus was, even though he was often surfing the internet.

A few minutes later, the visitors arrived near the boarding platform, located on the other side of a wooden hall decorated with bowls of plants.  
Every three minutes, a green off-road truck painted came, stopped next to the platform and its doors opened to let visitors go on board.

They resembled in many ways to the large safari trucks in some animal parks but those of _Expedition: Lost World_ could drive off-road and had six driving wheel but it was not these features that were the most remarkable.  
Due to the size, might and dangerousness of some denizens of the Reserve, passengers' safety had been the main concern of the vehicle's designers and some measures were taken to provide visitors an unforgettable and safe experience.  
Thus, the trucks had longitudinal bars that while they were close enough to each other to prevent animals from reaching the passengers, left between enough spaces to let the latter take pictures of quality.

Once the truck left, an employee wearing khaki shorts, a shirt of the same colour and a bush hat invited about forty visitors to step forward on the platform and make groups of around four in each of the ten waiting line ended by small doors that opened automatically when a truck stopped by the platform.  
Each of these lines was associated with a bench seat of the vehicle and given the fact that the more the benches were located at the back, the higher they were raised in comparison of the front one, one had to take a few steps in order to access the waiting lines for the seats at the rear of the vehicle.  
After following the few zigzags that ended the main line, Zach and Gray finally arrived at its end, just behind the group of young people and when another truck stopped by the platform, the employee in khaki uniform invited them to cross the white line painted on the floor that marked the end of the line.

"Four passengers per row, please!" She said. "Four passengers per row!"

Zach and Gray went in the third line and waited for the arrival of the next truck.

It appeared on their right a few moments later and when it was stopped, the driver pressed a button that engaged the opening of the truck's doors.  
Once those were open, the lights at the end of the lines changed from red to green and the small doors opened, allowing the passengers to board the vehicle.

When they all had taken a seat, the driver pressed a button that engaged the door closing mechanism.  
They closed with a small click and the truck left the platform and the station. The driver, a paunchy man in his sixties sporting an elegant white moustache, long hair gathered in a ponytail and wearing the same khaki uniform as the employee on the platform, spoke:

"Greetings everyone and welcome to the Reserve ! My name is Walter and I will be your guide today," he introduced himself with a strong rural accent of the American West. "First of all, I would like to remind you of the safety instructions: Please remain seated with your hands inside the vehicle, don't shout, don't gesticulate and don't try to feed the animals through the bars. The Reserve is mainly inhabited by herbivores but if you think that the _Triceratops_ or the apatosaurs are as docile as cows, you are mistaken because like some large herbivorous mammals such as elephants or hippopotamuses, some species of herbivorous dinosaurs fiercely defend their territory or their offspring and therefore can be very dangerous if they are angered. It's a photo safari so make sure that your cameras are ready. If I see some animals, I will point them to you and if you see something, don't hesitate to say it. With this, may the safari begin!"

The dirt road on which they were driving was surrounded on both sides by a thick wall of impenetrable vegetation.  
Near the edge of the road, there were weird-looking plants with a thick trunk and very large leaves.

As Walter told his passengers, they were cycads, a plant family that was prosperous during the Jurassic and the Cretaceous but that, following the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, declined and ended up disappearing from the northern hemisphere, leaving only around a hundred species by the beginning of the 21st century.  
Most of the Jurassic World cycads were not clones of Mesozoic cycads but specimens of modern species that had been acclimatised on Isla Nublar in order to decorate the park and also complete the food of herbivorous dinosaurs which were fond of those.

In front of them, a cattle grid was stretched at the end of the road, over a moat and once the din produced by the action of the wheels on the metal bards ceased, the passengers knew that they had entered into the Reserve.  
When they turned, those sitting in the last row saw the cattle grid and the moat disappeared behind dense vegetation while the truck was following the road along a small ridge overlooking a grassy clearing.

Inside the Reserve, the austere road was the only trace of human activity since wherever the passengers looked, they did not see the shadow of a building.  
All around them, Nature and its manifestations that were the calls, vocalizations and songs of various animals and the rustling of foliage were only disturbed by the noise produced by the truck's liquid propane engine.  
With the tall araucarias of the Giants Grove rising not far away, the passengers had the impression that they travelled back to the Mesozoic era, and the shivers of adventure were running down the spines of many while cameras or smartphones in hand, they scanned the surroundings, searching for animals.  
Nearly two hundred meters after the moat, visitors saw the first dinosaurs of the tour in the middle of a clearing of yellowed grass bathed by the sunrays.

The dinosaurs in question were small deer-sized bipedal herbivores with white-speckled backs and bodies built for speed as evidenced by their long and muscular legs counterbalanced by a long and stiff tail.  
There was a herd of about thirty individuals of all ages and sexes, distinguishable mainly by their colour but also by the presence or absence of wattles.  
Thus, most of the adults were females, recognizable by their beige body and lack of wattles, while the few males in the herd were larger than the females (some of them were more than four meters long) and had a brown-red body and red wattles.

"One of our dryosaurs herds," the guide said. "They are not to be confused with the othnielosaurs, or Othies as some nickname them, which are smaller and prefer denser habitats although these two species are sometimes seen feeding together at some spots, mainly at the edge of forests or in areas recently cleared by the sauropods or any very large herbivores. Look at how they eat…"

As they were walking, the dryosaurs kept their long necks lowered and grazed with their beaks or dug the ground with their short arms ended in a five-fingered hand.  
When they were close, some of the visitors noticed that they had cheeks that prevented them from losing the food while chewing them.

"Due to their role in the North American ecosystems of the late Jurassic, these ornithopods can be compared to antelopes of the African savannahs such as the Impala. In Southern and Eastern Africa's reserves, impalas are often the most numerous herbivores and this also applies here for their Jurassic counterpart. We have nearly one hundred and fifty of them in the Reserve, divided into several herds like this one, with about thirty individuals in each."

They also noted that the top of the skull, the neck, and the torso were covered with small filamentous hair-like structures which actually were a primitive form of feathers.

When the truck passed a stone's throw from the animals, those suddenly jumped like kangaroos and the visitors uttered exclamations of awe, admiring the agility and the speed of the dryosaurs.

"They are so easy to breed that InGen wants to introduce these animals to the exotic meat market. To be honest, I'm not really a supporter of the idea but if I'm mentioning this, it's for telling you that you might see in the near future some dryo meat between Ostrich and Kangaroo's ones in the butcher's department of some supermarkets."

Walter raised his head to watch the sky and then he looked at the foliage of the trees to see if there was some wind and which direction it was blowing.  
Realizing that the foliage hardly moved, the guide said with enthusiasm:

"Let's go now in the jungle, the mighty jungle of Isla Nublar. When we will come out of it, I guarantee you that you'll get a breath-taking show. Provided that the weather doesn't change of course."

The truck continued north-west, going deep into the jungle, passing under tall trees with sprawling roots and a foliage so dense that it barely let daylight reach the ground.


	33. A Captain's mistake

Following the guards' mission thanks to the footage send by their frontal cameras, Dearing was pacing in the control room where all were concentrated on the management of the crisis but this concentration was disturbed when the technicians heard the security guard in front of the room raise his voice:

"Grady, if you do not have the necessary accreditation to enter this room, I'll have to ask you to get out of here!"

Dearing turned and saw Grady arguing with the J-SEC officer and if the first was getting too much on the nerves of the latter, he was going to force him out of the building and in order to save face, she intervened:

"Let him in !"

The guard opened the door and the keeper entered, bringing with him a smell of gas that led the director and the technicians in the last row to grimace or pinch their noses.

"Ah, thank God you are alive and well. However, can you tell me exactly what happened there?" She asked him.

But he walked directly to Cruthers, ignoring Dearing's question.

"What is the situation?" He asked to the chief technician.

"Owen, I asked you a question!" Dearing barked.

"I don't know!' Grady finally replied. 'She woke up in the middle of the operation. Nick must had underestimate the amount of tranquilizer to administer. I warned you on this matter and nothing has been done."

"As you implied earlier, she would have an overdose, Amy Winehouse style, if we had overestimated this amount and given her value, it's a risk that we couldn't afford to take. What happened is a tragedy and I would make sure personally that the families of the victims will receive a compensation, but this is not the first incident of this kind in a zoological park," Dearing retorted.

"Except that no animal bred in captivity to this day is as large, dangerous, and cunning as Indominus. The situation is serious, very serious and we all know what happened the last time a giant theropod was on the run in a populated area."

"Claire, can you explain to me why a convoy of the guard went north?" Someone asked as he entered the control room.

Grady was shocked when he realized that it was Masrani who asked this question since in such situations, he would have been one of the first people informed.

 _He doesn't know? For fuck's sake Claire, what are you doing?  
_  
Masrani looked at the map and saw the following message:

 **Sector 7**  
Level 5 Alert  
 _Evacuation in Progress_

He thought first that the area was being evacuated because of a sudden activity of Mount Sibo but when he saw the footage from the guards' cameras, showing them fully armed and advancing in a tight formation on the foggy and inhospitable lower slopes of the volcano, he concluded that one of his worst fears had realised.

"Mr Masrani, I was going to tell you about the situation..." Dearing started.

Masrani said nothing and just gave a disapproving look to Dearing while the technicians fixed the screens of their consoles, pretending to be fully occupied by their task to avoid being involved in a potential argument and thus, the room became silent for long seconds.  
Masrani went behind Cruthers, put his hand on the back of the technician's chair and asked him in a whisper what exactly had happened and while Cruthers was telling him about the escape, Grady watched the guards footage on the main screen and he was shocked to see that they only had a few shotguns and assault rifles along with their sabres as lethal weapons.

"Their weapons ..." he said worriedly. "They will be ineffective. Her skin is too thick. Where is she?"

"According to our predictions, she should be somewhere in the eastern part of Little Gorgoroth but we do not know where exactly since she clawed her implant out," Krill answered.

"They are tracking blind... If they fall into an ambush, it's gonna be a slaughter!" The keeper stated. "Tell them to abort the mission! Now!"

"You are not in position to give orders here!" Dearing said to him sharply. "We maintain the mission!"

"The very existence of this park is based on our ability to handle incidents like this and the escape of the Indominus was an eventuality to which the Guard was prepared so let them capture it without any further fuss," Masrani intervened.

Grady turned to the owner of the park.

"Mr. Masrani, you ordered the creation of a genetic hybrid for the sole purpose of putting it between four walls and show it to hordes of visitors," he said. "She didn't know about what was beyond her enclosure and she sees some things for the first time. She is all alone in the world and therefore, doesn't know what she is."

"Do you think this animal is aware of itself?" Masrani asked. "Like dolphins, elephants and apes?"

"She's learning where she's in the food chain, and I'm not sure you'd like her to know how far she can go. No one has any idea how exactly she will react if she encounter other animals, or worse, a group of visitors. The guards have a minigun in their armory so call back the Pegasus so they can equip it with it and smoke her!"

"It is feasible only if this damn fog go away and the I. rex want to show up," Harriman said from his working station.

"Twenty-six million dollars have been invested in this creature. Killing it is out of the question!" Masrani said, raising his voice.

"And there are families here!" Dearing added. "I refuse to turn the island into a war zone."

"If nothing is done, it is likely to become one," Grady retorted. "We must evacuate the park!"

"Nothing is done? Because this hunt is just hot air for you? Like sending men on the northern border of the Reserve? There is a helicopter and more than fifty guards currently deployed in this area. In other words, it is dealing with a fucking little army. All the crossing points have been blocked and with each minute that passes, the noose is tightening around the Indominus and it will be eventually forced to come out of hiding and captured before it reaches the Limes, which prevents it from going to the rest of the park. So no, I will evacuate the park only if the situation go south, an eventuality that, despite the current circumstances, is unlikely to happen. When the I. rex will be brought back to its enclosure, then we could have a discussion about its future but in the meantime, if you plan to just bitch about my decisions and do no nothing concrete, you have no reason to be here."

Grady sighed and said:

"With you, it's always _No, carry on; it's fascinating!_ I mean, it's true! You ask for my opinion and then tell me to fuck off! If that's how things are going here, I'm leaving. I will be in my bungalow if anyone is looking for me."

Angered, he left the room, slamming the door on the way and when he disappeared in the hallway, Masrani turned to the director.

"Claire, I have to talk to you alone," he told her gravely. "Follow me, please."

She followed Masrani out of the room and up to the middle of the Eye where they stopped.  
The fog that covered the entire island during the early morning had mostly dissipated and remained only in the mountains and in the northernmost part of the island, the one they were facing.

"If I decided to talk to you here it's because I am a supporter of the concept of saving face," he said. "We could very well have this talk in the control room but I hate humiliate people in public when it's not necessary and in times of crisis, humiliating a leader in front of his subordinates is nothing but a bad manner. As you must have noticed, I didn't appreciate the fact that you didn't tell me about the incident and if I hadn't seen from my veranda the guards helicopter flying northwards, perhaps I would still be in the dark while this park, _my_ park, is in danger and I refuse to let the result of billions of dollars of personal investment be reduced to nothing! I can feel lucky that Captain Hamada is on the field, personally leading his men. Lord Pennant, the founder and first Marshal of the Grey Guard, had told me about him once and through what he went through. I am sure that he will successfully lead the capture operation and that is why he has my entire trust. I would have liked to say the same about you but given your decisions, I am afraid that it's not possible and I hope that you have a good excuse," he exposed in a calm but disappointed and stern tone.

"To be honest Sir, I thought I could take care of this incident quickly and not worry you unnecessarily..." Dearing said.

"Not worry me unnecessarily? Claire, given the nature of the situation, I have the right to be worry, just like everyone else. I can see why Mr. Grady is angry and a man who barely escape death is not of the most rational and quick to let his feelings speak. Thus, I invite you to have an understanding with him because we might need his expertise. To come back to you, you are like a captain who made a decision of strategic importance before a battle without informing his general. But in doing so, he compromises all the established strategy put to win the battle and a lack of communications within an army can lead to its defeat, defeat of which the captain will be responsible. I think you are clever enough to understand that you have disappointed me and that my confidence in you has been considerably eroded. If I was you, I would get down to solve this situation as soon as possible, otherwise the consequences could be restrictive for the rest of your career. You think that if I had enough influence to push InGen to put you at the helm of this park, I can also dismiss you from your position and trust me, I will be breathing down your neck until it's over. Understood?"

"Understood, sir," Dearing answered in a low voice while her eyes were staring at the floor.

"Well. I let you think about it for a few minutes but don't take your time. You have a lot on your plate," he told her coldly before heading back to the control room.

Dearing, her hands clenched on the guardrail, let out a frustrated sigh while she was looking towards Mount Sibo.  
She would have liked to stay there for a few more minutes in order to try to relax but out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone walking towards her once Masrani had disappeared inside the building and when she turned, she realized to her dissatisfaction that it was Wu.

"Did you come to enjoy my trouble, Henry?" She asked sharply.

"I learned about the escape and worried, I came to ask how the situation was evolving," the geneticist said affably.

"Don't take me for a fool! I know very well that you are rubbing hands at the idea of seeing my career in peril because it could eventually allow you to take my place."

"Let me tell you that if the circumstances were not so serious, I would do it with pleasure and I would have already said some little joke," he acknowledged while keeping a serious tone, dismayed to see that, despite the situation, Dearing had not missed the opportunity to treat him like some court's schemer.

"Just to calm you down, I would be tempted to allow the guards to kill what you consider as your _magnum opus_ ," she said in a tone that seemed to be full of contempt for the term. "I would even kill it myself if was in position to do it."

Wu sneered, finding this declaration ridiculous.

"Given the fact that you are not even able to look at her during the test showings, let me doubt that you have the courage to face the largest land predator that has ever walked on this planet. Moreover, giving this order would bring Masrani's wrath upon you and wasting all the efforts you put in this project. On a professional level, you will be shooting yourself in the foot and you know it too well that even with all the will in the world, you would be unable to do it since your future depends on her. You are linked to her but what do you want, the tide can't always be in one favor."

With furious eyes, Dearing suddenly turned to the geneticist in the manner of an animal that would have been too much annoyed with a stick and with all claws out, was preparing to retaliate.

"Spare me of your pop psychology and your sarcasms!" She retorted brutally, looking at him straight in the eyes.

Then she turned and headed for the control room, walking briskly and leaving Wu alone on this portion of the Eye.  
He stood there a few seconds, breathing some fresh air before heading pensively towards the elevator in order to go to the laboratories within the Discovery Center.  
It was then that he felt a draught on his face, the one of a wind blowing from the north.


	34. Little Gorgoroth

As he felt a north wind rise, Hamada looked towards the top of Mount Sibo to see if the fog would move or not.  
When he saw it flew down the slopes and reveal the volcano's summit that was concealed until then, Hamada knew they would have finally a good visibility because they had progressed in the middle of the fog, which had not reassured the company at all.  
He had ordered his men to form a compact group with the hoplites at the periphery in order to respond quickly to any ambush from the Indominus which, in the case she charged them, would have run straight towards the pikes.

Even when there was no fog, Little Gorgoroth was a gloomy place that had nothing in common with the rest of the island, a true tropical paradise in the minds of the visitors. Although they could hike in the southern part of the area, they could only do it on walkways or marked trails and where forbidden to walk away from those, at the risk of being fined or expelled from the park.  
Thus, barely anyone went in the very heart of Little Gorgoroth, not even the employees who had hardly any reason to go there.  
If the park was a garden of Eden then Little Gorgoroth was the gates of hell or at least something that looked like those with its jagged rocks, ash mounds, pools of mud, the countless fumaroles that rose from cracks in the ground and the few stunted trees that managed to grow against all odds.  
As Darbinian had mentioned earlier, there was a smell of sulphur, which made the place unpleasant and accentuated the feeling of oppression there.  
In some places, there were even some scattered bones lying on the ground, often at the entrance of caves or old mines, but they were too fragmentary to determine the nature of their owners but the guards knew that men of InGen's security division had disappeared in the area more than a decade ago, probably ambushed, and the bones they saw could very well be theirs.

It sometimes happened that the remains of those who disappeared at this period were found at the bottom of some chasm, half-buried in the jungle's wet soil or even rotting in a swamp like in the case of a body discovered by some hikers weeks earlier in the High Marsh, at the top of the Southern Plateau.  
The J-SEC had to close the hiking trails of the marsh while the body and the mummified remains of the dilophosaur, one of the infamous Three Gorgons, that lied beside it were removed. It was like if the two adversaries had fought fiercely before succumbing to their respective wounds before being buried under the mud of the marsh where both had fallen into oblivion.  
By reappearing, these remains reminded of a time where the key word on an once again wild island which had fallen to chaos was survival, a time that would come again if the guards failed their mission and if the Indominus found a way to get into the rest of the park.

All their hopes of finding the Indominus as soon as possible rested on the drones that were flying before them.  
As they moved westward, the fog dissipated and when the guards arrived in sight of the crater in which Escarcéga hid more than twenty minutes earlier, it had almost disappeared.

"He went inside the crater ... And she stopped at the edge," one of the techs stated after he saw on his screen that the tracks of the worker were leading to the edge.

"Baker, Sandros. Go have a look!" Brunet ordered.

Baker and a copper-skinned man with mid-long brown hair nodded, moved towards the rim and their comrades heard them slide down the edge while they were searching the surroundings.

"Clear!" Sandros shouted from the bottom of the crater.

As she was walking along the rim, Durant's attention was caught by a small object on the ground, a cross hanging on a chain.  
When she knelt to pick it up, she saw that there were also a few drops of blood drying on the rocks around.

"Did you find something Tamara?" Drekanson asked her.

"I think it was his," she replied, showing him the cross. "And there is also some blood around me."

"She got him? _Merde_..." Brunet swore.

"Or maybe he was just hurt," Suggested Sandros, who had climbed up to them in the meantime. "The larger rock at the bottom smells urine. He surely pissed on himself while he was hiding behind. As for blood, there are smashed rocks of various sizes around his hiding place. Maybe one fell on his head…"

"The drops of blood are too scattered to come from a single wound," Bellamy affirmed. "It's like someone shook a steak here. I think she caught him but didn't kill him here."

"Patience is right," Brunet said. "If that had been the case, we would have a slaughter in front of us and not a few drops of blood."

"The readings that I get are going along with this," Rahim added, not raising his eyes from the screen of his tablet and watching the infrared images transmitted by his drone which was hovering next to them. "He was pinned to the ground before being dragged to the spot where Tam has just picked up the cross."

"That explains how he lost it," Durant said. "As a believer, I am frightened when I imagine myself in his place and helplessly watching my cross fall to the ground while I'm dragged to my death. The impression of being ..."

"Abandoned by God?" Brunet finished. "You never saw war from close and it shows, Durant."

"Lieutenant!" Hailed one of the techs, a blond Belgian man with an aquiline face.

"Yes, Verplancke?"

"I found her tracks, heading to the southwest..."

"Back to the jungle," Hamada completed.

He was looking towards the tree line, five hundred meters away at a lower altitude.

"She probably heard the _Pegasus_ when she was about to kill the worker. She must have been scared and went to take refuge under trees, bringing the worker with her. But I fear that we can no longer hope for him," he said, bitter. "If we could corner her before she reach the Limes, it would be a good thing. Contact the men on guard there. They must double their vigilance," he ordered. "Let's move."

As they were about to leave, the guards suddenly felt the ground vibrating under their feet and soon after, rocks tumbled down the slopes or fell from their walls further away.  
The tremor lasted just for a few seconds and leaving cautiously, the company left the crater behind them and headed south, walking in single fine towards the fog screen that concealed the jungle in the south. Over it, the guards could manage however to distinguish the plains and the clearings of the Reserve further south and at a lower altitude.


	35. The Western Valley

"We now enter on the territory of Bucephalus, our male shantungosaur," Walter announced as the road was skirting the northern edge of a steep-sided valley.

At its bottom, more than thirty meters below, the white waters of the Loudwater flowed westward towards a waterfall which roar could be heard by the passengers despite the noise of the engine and the calls of the Chestnut-mandibled toucans perched in the trees overhanging the valley.

"Aside the sauropods, Bucephalus is the largest living animal in the Reserve with a length of sixteen meters long and a weight of sixteen tons, almost as much as three males African Elephants. If there is a sovereign in this part of the reserve, it's him. Bucephalus became the breeding male of our shantungosaur herd after pushing his predecessor, his own brother, over a cliff. You know the rest of the story: Some visitors had filmed the scene and the video was uploaded on the internet where Bucephalus became a star. Despite his size, one can hardly spot him in a place like this so open your eyes if you want to have a chance to see him. However, if we encounter him, stay silent and make as few movements as possible. Although he tolerates our presence on his territory, he is short-tempered and if there is one thing that one must not do in the presence of a male shantungo, it's honking. He takes this as a provocation and in other words, it's like you were signing your own death warrant."

They ceased to drive along the edge and returned inside the jungle and its dim light.  
The road described a large curve before going down a steep slope in a straight line.

"Hold on!" Walter said.

The truck drove down the slope, shaking the passengers in their seats, crossed the narrow and shallow river at its foot before driving up the slope of an embankment on the opposite side.

Once they were driving again on a flat area, the visitors heard movement in the thickets on their left, small animals running.  
Turning their head towards the origin of the noises, they glimpsed small bipedal dinosaurs one meter twenty long and forty centimetres tall with a bluish skin mottled with green and striped with black.

"The small dinosaurs that are running through the thickets to your left are yinlongs, a primitive species of ceratopsian. Unlike more advanced and popular members of this family such as _Styracosaurus_ or _Triceratops_ , _Yinlong_ has no developed frill and no horns."

When three yinlongs came out of the bushes to stop on a trunk lying on the embankment bordering the road, the passengers could fully see them.  
Their tail was thick and their hind legs long and sturdy while their heads were wide and short.  
The upper jaw was ended by a beak and, looking carefully, some of the visitors saw that it was also equipped with a pair of canines, like the Tufted deer.  
The yinlongs were staring at the passengers with their big black eyes, tilting their heads, which gave them a comical look recalling those of some rodents.  
The passengers were delighted and amused by these dinosaurs which were cute and ugly at the same time and when one of them asked Walter why there was none of them in the petting zoo, he told him that the yinlongs had the nasty habit of wanting to bite fingers and could be aggressive towards other animals of the same size or smaller.

Suddenly, a loud and hoarse call was heard, making the passengers jump and the yinlongs flee.

"What was that?" One of the passengers asked.

"Oh, that? Just an _Ornitholestes_ ," Walter said casually, as if the presence of this animal did not worry him at all. "The call you just heard was a way of telling us _Beware, you're in my territory!_ It must be hidden somewhere in the trees. If you see one during a day safari, you can feel yourself lucky because they are nocturnal hunters."

Some visitors unfamiliar with this species raised their heads and looked up at the panels hanging above each rows and that featured drawings of the twenty-seven species of dinosaurs that could be encountered along the route.  
The name _Ornitholestes hermanni_ figured under a bipedal and slender creature with red eyes and a grey body sporting white stripes.  
The appearance of the animal in mind, they looked in the trees all around them in search of the predator.

"There!" Exclaimed one of the passengers. "On the branch."

He was pointing towards the branch of a Kapok tree, where a small lynx-sized theropod was watching them, lying on the branch with his legs hanging down.  
With its long tail, members, fingers, neck and its big eyes, the animal was very bird-like, a look that was reinforced by the fact that his whole body was covered with a coat of protofeathers.

"Are they dangerous?"

"The ornithos ? Ha ha..." Walter laughed. "I'm sure that they would be the kind of slipping inside houses in the middle of the night to abduct infants but confronted to an adult man, they won't be so bold. They will be more afraid of you than you will be afraid of them. On the other hand, if you ever end up walking on foot in the middle of the reserve following an unlikely combination of factors, I advise you to rather be careful of the compys. While there is only one, it's alright… It's when they are several that problems might occur."

When the truck came close to the Kapok tree, a purple dewlap inflate briefly under the predator's neck and a crest of black feathers streaked with white rose up on top of its head.  
Then it got up and cleared off, leaping nimbly on the trunk, hugging it with its arms and digging its claws into the bark before climbing towards the top and disappear behind the foliage before the visitors had the time to take a decent picture of it.

"All these little dinosaurs are cute but where are the big ones?" One of the passengers asked on an impatient tone.

Around them, the density and size of the trees seemed to decrease as they progressed, indicating that they were approaching the edge of the jungle.

After a bend bordered by a mass of shrubs, one of the passengers uttered an exclamation of surprise when he looked to his right and immediately, the others turned in this direction before pointing cameras and smartphones on an apatosaur that was feeding on low plants.  
Despite its size, the visitors had not noticed its presence earlier because of not only the shrubs but also of the fact that the sauropod was silent during their approach.

Hearing the multiple clicks of the cameras, it lifted its neck and its head went closer to the truck, staring at the passengers with a bovine look.  
His _Panasonic Lumix_ in his hand, Gray was trying to centre the herbivore's head that was only a few feet from him.  
It was so close that by passing his arm between the bars, he could have touched its mouth.

A melodious song echoed through the air and the apatosaur raised its head to answer to it with a small bellow.  
Then he turned away from the truck and walked opposite of the road, trampling the vegetation across its path.

"It is going to join his herd," Walter said. "I suggest that we continue our journey and leave these woods. We will surely find our friend in the plain."

The apatosaur disappeared behind the trees and the truck continued to drive northward.  
Through a gap between the trees, the passengers briefly glimpsed the landscape beyond and when they turned their gaze towards the cabin's panoramic windshield once they were about to leave the jungle, their eyes widened, full of wonder because they had the impression of having a window on a scene that seemed straight from another age.

A vast grassy plain was stretching in front of them, between a cluster of hills southwest of Mount Sibo, the wooded slopes of the Western Cordillera and a plateau in the east.  
The plain was more than three kilometres long and was cut in its centre by a river, the same one they had crossed earlier after driving down the slope. It took its source in the hills to the north, not far from the hot springs resort, and formed a strip that stretched southward, joined along its course by several streams or tributary torrents, flowing down from the cordillera or thin waterfalls of about forty meters high on a part of the plateau's edge.  
Not far from the southern rim of the plain, the river forked eastward, disappearing within the jungle before joining the Loudwater.  
On each side of the river, animals grazed under a clear sky while a hot air balloon, identical to the one seen from the panoramic terrace earlier, was flying over the valley.

The truck came out of the jungle and followed the road that crossed the plain from one end to the other.  
On their right, they saw the apatosaur met a few moments earlier trotting to join a dozen of other individuals which had started walking northward, forming a line.  
When the truck came closer to the apatosaur herd that was walking along the road, the passenger noticed that Cattle Egrets and White Egrets were perched on the backs of the sauropods, pecking their skin from time to time to eat the parasites.  
As they were driving just a few meters from the herd, the visitors were almost glued to the bars, dumbstruck. The apatosaurs majesty had a strong impression on them.

The truck passed this line of giants and a herd of grazing _Gallimimus_. Since their long necks were lowered and their beaks pulling tufts of grass and that their heads rose only intermittently and were hidden most of time by the tall grass, one couldn't help but to have in mind the adage of the ostrich with its head in the sand.  
When the apatosaurs arrived at their level, the _Gallimimus_ moved aside and joined other ones at the edge of the river where they were quenching their thirst or cleaning their feathers.

Further ahead on the road, the truck stopped to let a group of corythosaurs pass in front of it. They were joining the rest of their herd further away, lying alongside some _Parasaurolophus_ of which they liked the company.  
Once all the corythosaurs were on the other side, the truck resumed its journey across the valley.

To the south, on the other side of the river, there were half a dozen of large duckbill dinosaurs with a dark-brown skin and browsing the leaves of the trees at the edge of the jungle.  
Some were standing on their hind legs and thanks to their front legs leaning on the trunk, they were trying to reach the highest leaves.  
Unlike the _Parasaurolophus_ and the corythosaurs, they had no crest on top of their skull and were much larger and sturdier than both species.

"Bucephalus' herd," Walter pointed to the passengers."It's the females that you see. If you catch the glimpse of one with a black skin, it's him, but I cannot see him from here. He must be hidden behind the trees. Maybe we'll encounter him on the way back with a little luck."

The truck arrived at the river and began the crossing of a rocky ford.

Half hidden within the riparian vegetation further downstream, Gray caught the glimpse of two crane-sized dinosaurs with ash feathers.  
The animals were fishing and thanks to the panel, the passengers could have guessed that they were unenlagias, a species of small and mostly piscivorous theropod belonging to the _Unenlagiinae_ , a subfamily of _Dromaeosauridae_ characterized by a beak-like long and narrow snout.

On the other side, the road was leading them straight towards the sleeping giant that was Mount Sibo. Towering over the landscape, it occupied a central and prominent position at the very heart of the panorama the visitors had.  
By its composition, said panorama was reminiscent of some iconic photos of Mount Kilimanjaro where one could saw various members of the African megafauna roaming the savannah at the foot of the famous volcano except that there, there were no zebras, elephants or giraffes but an _Ankylosaurus_ and its young walking not far from the truck, two mamenchisaurs near the northern edge as well as a herd of horned dinosaurs of the size of a rhinoceros in the distance. Their beige or dark red bodies were half-hidden by the tall grass but thanks to their spiky frill and their long nasal horn, some visitors knew that they were styracosaurs.  
As if to give a scale to this picture, there was another safari truck in the middle of the plan, lost and tiny in the middle of this majestic setting.  
Captivated by the latter and the dinosaurs, the majority of visitors didn't enjoyed the rare sight of one of the original inhabitants of the island, a raptor with a naked head whose wrinkled skin was red, yellow and grey : A King Vulture, a sacred bird for the Tun-Si.  
Perched at the top of a Rain tree or _Samanea saman_ , it watched truck driven by Walter follow the road to the north-east, towards the mamenchisaurs.

These slender titans with a brownish scaly skin were the largest animal species living in Isla Nublar and ever bred in captivity, reaching thirty-five meters in length and weighing about sixty tons, dwarfing even the apatosaurs. They were so carefree that they paid no attention to the few dryosaurs around them and between their legs, even threatening to crush them if they weren't paying attention.

"Mamenchisaurs are famous for the excessive length of their neck," Walter said, "more than fifteen meters, half of their total length and a few more meters than the truck in which you are sitting. It is the longest ever observed in the animal kingdom and its developed musculature gives it a great flexibility as you can see."

During their approach, one of the mamenchisaurs had kept its neck horizontal, seeming to feed on low plants but it raised it as soon as the truck was less than twenty meters from its head.  
At the spot where its head had been lowered a few moments earlier, next to the edge of the road, the passengers saw a pile of smooth pebbles and when they looked up to the animal's neck that was hold obliquely, they noticed that it was swallowing something.  
Walter gave them the name of this type of pebbles, gastroliths, and he explained that just like birds, many dinosaurs swallowed gastroliths to facilitate the grinding of food within the gizzard and thus digestion.

The mamenchisaurs were so close to each other that when they touched each other with their necks that were raising some fourteen meters above the ground, they formed a sort of archway under which the truck passed before continuing towards the misty jungle in front of them.  
During their crossing of the valley, the fog had ran down the slopes before stopping at the level of the forested hills and ridge that marked the northern border of the Reserve.


	36. The Limes

Between the Western Cordillera and the Embrace's northern mountainous arc, a high fence was stretching at the top of the ridge across several kilometres, like a steel curtain separating the Reserve from Sector seven.  
On the side of the first, it was followed in parallel by a thin dirt path on which walked a horse with a bay coat, ridden by Niall Forrester.  
He was frequently looking on the other side of the fence, wary of any suspicious noise in the jungle.

Although the guards and the control room team thought that any attempt of frontal assault from the Indominus on the fence would failed due to the size and the sturdiness of the structure (which had been designed after all to contain the powerful animals that lived in the Reserve), they had deployed men along it in the aim of watching the movements of the escaped dinosaur but also to prevent the safari trucks from coming too close while the situation is settled.  
By riding eastward, Niall had the same sight for several minutes, the one of the path and the fence disappearing in the fog, and the only the event of passing from time to time some of his colleagues that were riding in the opposite direction broke this disturbing monotony.  
The latter was broken again when he a watchtower appeared next to the path, then a second, the two flanking a gate in the fence.

Due to a lack of maintenance, the watchtowers had deteriorated over time and creepers had stormed the structures while the fact that they were established on the Reserve's side betrayed a use prior to the latter's creation and that they had been built to watch on what was on the side of Sector Seven.

Actually, the northern portion of the Reserve's perimeter fence and the watchtowers was all that was left of what was known as the Limes, named in reference to the lines of fortifications that were established along the borders of the Roman Empire because it had the similar purpose as it.  
Built to protect the construction sites from wild dinosaur attacks, it was even compared to Hadrian's Wall by Hoskins when he had talked to the investors and the Costa Rican government, both worried about the situation at the time.  
The Limes stretched about twenty-one kilometres across the island from one coast to the other, and everything north or east of that boundary had been included in what was once called the Restricted Area where only a part of the employees of InGen's security division had been allowed to go there.

Due to the exceptional circumstances of that day, the watchtowers had been hastily garrisoned by the guards.  
Standing near the gate, Niall saw Tian and Velasquez, who from what he heard, were at the Coliseum when the I. rex escaped, and in the nearest watchtower from him, Turner was scanning the surroundings.

"Hey guys! Any news?" He asked them.

They turned to greet him and once he was by the base of the watchtower, Niall pulled on the horse's reins and dismounted.

"Absolutely nothing aside from this damn fog," Velasquez replied. "We can't see anything through it. And on your side?"

"Nothing either along the fence. Could you keep an eye on my horse while I'm going to relieve myself?" He asked them after winding the reins around one of the tower's beams.

"Yes, of course," Tian said. "Wait, by relieving yourself you mean ...?"

"Drop a log, yeah. And having a piss also by the occasion. With the bustle of earlier, I didn't have the time to go to the bathrooms. If Rocinante is frightened by some dino, I fear that I will soil myself because of the surprise and the prospect of having the ass full of shit or the crotch bathing in piss on a bouncing saddle isn't pleasant," Niall explained.

The mounted guards, led by Lieutenant Glenmore, had ridden a full tilt through the jungles and the meadows of the Reserve for half an hour in order to reach the Limes as quickly as possible, catching the curious eye on the way of some dinosaurs and the passengers of a truck they had seen from afar. The fact that the ride was quite long and sustained had made Niall's stomach work and when he had arrived at the gate guarded by the three recruits, had felt a furious urge to do his business.

"Ok. Well, happy shitting then..." Turner said to him.

"And watch out for the compys! It would be a shame that they eat your cock," Velasquez warned.

"Don't worry! Cock-eating compys are nothing but a legend. Actually, it's one of the pieces they don't like… If any of these little fags dares to pick a fight with me, I have my prod," Niall reassured him while taking his cattle prod out of the sheath on his back.

When he leaved, he also took his rifle and then advanced towards the fog before disappearing in it while the three recruits returned to their post.

The gate was facing the volcano and at its level, the Limes was cutting in half a strip of cleared land of about a hundred meters wide.  
Some strident calls, those of the _Quetzalcoatlus_ whose aviary was nearby, came occasionally from the north-east. Luckily, the aviary had been evacuated, like most of Sector Seven.

On the side of the latter, the jungle had been silent for several minutes and only the sound of the wind bending the blades of grass was heard.

"It's too quiet," Velasquez muttered. "Way too quiet."

Growing up in a village on the edge of the jungle, Velasquez had been used to its sounds since his childhood and during the years when he was a policeman in the countryside, he had learned to be suspicious of the jungle when it was silent since it meant that something shady was afoot there.  
However the silence did not seem to worry Tian and Turner. Both had grown up in an urban environment, where people had lost contact with nature and couldn't read in it anymore. For them, the jungle was nothing but a quagmire where a whole set of dangerous creatures lived and during the week the recruits were left stranded in the jungle as part of their training, Velasquez remembered that they and Rahim had particularly suffered while it had been more easy for Durant and him.

The sudden flight of a group of Great green macaws from the canopy of Sector Seven's jungle caught their attention and they watched the parrots fly over the gate and let out hoarse calls.  
From the top of his watchtower, Turner was faintly hearing something moving in their direction through the vegetation.

"Guys, I think she's coming!" He said.

"I'm bringing the jeep closer," Tian said. "Its spotlights will help us to see through the fog."

Tian went in the jeep that was parked next to the watchtower right of the gate and brought it in front of the latter so that the spotlights fixed to the roof could be pointed towards the jungle.

"What do you see, Gareth?" She asked once the spotlights were turned on.

Turner looked at the end of the light beams, squinting, and seeing what was standing on the edge of the jungle, he said in an uncertain voice:

"You won't believe me but ... I have the worker in sight."

In their turn, Tian and Velasquez saw the figure in work overalls, holding his arm in front of his face as if to protect his eyes from the spotlight.

"What?! How is this possible? Hamada and the others said on the radio that she caught him," Tian reminded him.

"Well, he obviously managed to escape," Turner retorted.

The worker stepped in the cleared area, staggered on a few meters and fell on the grass.

"Shit. I'll go get him!" Velasquez declared before rushing to the gate to open it.

"Julio!" Turner barked. "The I. rex could be just behind. It looks like a trap!"

"He's dying for Christ's sake!" Velasquez shouted. "I'm going anyway!"

"I go with him," Tian proposed.

"Fine, go to your deaths!" Their comrade grumbled. "I'm telling the others on the meanwhile."

Rifles in hand, Tian and Velasquez opened the gate and trotted to the worker, glancing nervously toward the tress on the way.

Escarcéga was lying face down a little less than fifty meters from the gate and when they reached him, they turned him over and saw a series of bloody punctures on his chest and a laceration at the level of his abdomen. Given the large red stain on the blue suit, a lot of blood must had flowed through it. It looked like that the worker had been tortured and lynched.  
He smelled both urine and carrion and Tian briefly put the back of her hand against her mouth the time to hold back a retching sensation while Velasquez passed the left arm of the wounded over his shoulder.  
Tian did the same with his right arm and when they lifted him up, the worker regained consciousness and moaned. He whispered a few words in Spanish but Tian, who wasn't fluent in this language, only recognized _ángeles.  
_  
"What is he saying?" Tian asked in a whisper while they were dragged him to the gate.

"He asks if we are angels," Velasquez answered before addressing reassuring words to the worker.

But he had fallen back into unconsciousness and he was still bleeding. Seeing this, Tian took a piece of cloth out of her pocket and pressed it against the laceration to limit the bleeding.

"Gareth! Ready the jeep!" She shouted.

Turner came down from the watchtower and went to prepare the rear seat of the vehicle so that they could lay the wounded on it.

But while he was doing this, his comrades had not even crossed one-third of the distance separating them from the ajar portal and the wind suddenly became so strong that the panels of the gate opened wide.  
Its direction had changed, he was no longer blowing fully southward but rather towards the south-west as one could have observed through the orientation of the blades of grass.  
Thus, the smells of the jungle could reach the nostrils of Rocinante who was stamping while waiting for the return of her rider.  
It was then that a sudden panic seized the mare.

She frantically pulled on her reins and stomped the ground while letting out spine-chilling frenetic neighs.  
When Turner came to calm her down, he saw that her nostrils and eyes were dilated by fear.

"Calm down!" He said, his hand firmly gripping the reins.

On their side, Velasquez and Tian thought that they heard among the wind muffled footsteps on their left.  
With great worry, they looked to this side but saw nothing. They decided to accelerate and when they brought their gaze towards the gate, they noticed that Rocinante's panic was getting worse and if Turner didn't move aside, she was likely to hurt him or worse.

"Move aside!" They shouted.

While he had turned his head to see how far they were, Turner was thrown to the ground by a violent head blow from the horse and when he saw her rearing up above him, he screamed.

"Gareth!" Velasquez shouted, helpless.

Turner closed his eyes and tried to protect his head with his arm as Rocinante's hooves were approaching his face.

He indeed heard the hooves hitting the ground but felt no pain and when he opened his eyes, he noticed that the horse had barely avoided him. Rocinante pulled harder and harder on her reins in order to escape and as Turner was getting up, she managed to do it and fled, galloping at full speed towards the interior of the Reserve. Turner ran after her in vain for thirty meters before stopping when she disappeared into the jungle.

"Fucking nag!" He swore while his face was red with anger and his body filled with adrenaline.

Then he went back to the gate to help Tian and Velasquez.

On the way, a voice called out to him:

"Hey dude! Where's my horse?" Niall asked in a loud voice when he saw that his horse had disappeared.

But without asking for an answer, Niall ran to the gate as soon as he saw Tian and Velasquez cross it, dragging the worker, and closed it once the three of them were inside the reserve.

"We need to take him to the veterinary hospital. They will be able to keep him alive while the mainland sends a helicopter," he said urgently while helping them to put the worker on the back seat.

"I come," Velasquez volunteered.

"Then get in."

Velasquez went to the back and Niall grabbed the keys Tian gave him.

"As for you, inform Hamada and the control room. Keep an eye open! If Roci has fled, it's for a good reason. She is near," he warned Tian and Turner.

Niall climbed to the front, put the key on the ignition and started the jeep. The car moved backwards then joined the road and followed it southward.


	37. Metriacanthosaurs

Not far away, the visitors guided by Walter continued their safari.  
After crossing the valley, they had begun to climb again, gradually towards the ridge that acted as the northern frontier of the Reserve.

The truck slowed down when they arrived in sight of a slightly sloping grassy paddock whose four meter high electrified fence was hidden for the most part by the vegetation and the terrain. Where the road passed near the paddock, the truck was separated from its denizens only by a wide and deep dry moat bordered by a rocky low wall on the side of the road.  
A hand-painted sign on the latter indicated the name of the place: Metriacanthosaurs Hill.

"We have arrived at Metriacanthosaurs Hill, where a pack of seven of these medium-sized carnivorous dinosaurs live. Three adults, a male named Boomer and two females, Sheala and Priscilla; and four subadults who are the offspring of Boomer and Sheala : Kenny, Terrence, Philippe and Philippa. Let's see where our hosts are..."

Luckily for the visitors, the paddock was mostly open and there were only a few trees and rocks, which made the observation of the animals particularly easy.  
As he was driving slowly, Walter looked towards the end of the paddock from where the predators could watch from the top of the slope the herbivores that came to a meadow nearby.  
He saw one of the animals walking along the fence at a fast pace.  
It was eight meters long and two meters height at shoulder level and had the basic features of most medium and large predatory theropods, including bipedalism, a bulky skull with strong jaws and counterbalanced by a pendulum-like tail, rather short arms with three clawed fingers and hind legs built for pursuit.  
Although its morphology was quite classic for a carnivorous theropod, it was more its colour that attracted the eye, cream on the underside while the rest of the body was of a dark brown that was almost black, with orange and black stripes on the tail, sides and neck while the head had beige ones. The animal was too far however for the visitors to notice other details.  
However, this issue was fixed when they passed in front of a small mound where five other metriacanthosaurs were lying in the shade of a Rain tree. Thus, they saw that the predators had a row of small spines running from the top of the head to the base of the tail and that the scaly sin of those carnosaurs had also black stripes on the snout, lime-green ones at the back of the head and small bony ridges above the eyes.  
Among the resting individuals, the subadults were recognized almost immediately since they were smaller and more slender than their parents, with a length of six meters, and Walter also pointed out the major difference between the two sexes. The females had a lighter skin which was more orange-brown, like the coat of a Bengal tiger, while the males were the dark-brown ones.

Once the truck was at the level of the mound, one of the metiacanthosaurs raised its head and looked at the vehicle before yawning and going back to sleep.

"They are not very active," one of the visitors commented on a bored tone.

"Oh, when a monkey gets lost in the paddock, they becomes crazy, trust me !" Walter replied. "Metriacanthosaurs are predators that can be very fast and they can even jump ! But don't worry, we are safe behind the moat. According to ethological observations made on Isla Sorna, they adopt different hunting strategies according to the size of the prey. In the case of large ones, the metris gather together to pursue the prey and inflict deep scratches or bites capable of causing haemmorhagies by cutting the flesh and the arteries, resulting in the death of the animal after a long and exhausting hunt while in the case of the small ones, the metris usually hunt alone and rams into their prey head first, knocking them down before maintaining them on the ground with one leg and ripping off their head."

One of the subadults was lying near the edge of the moat, showing her back to the visitors and when she heard the clicks of the cameras, she woke up and arched her head back, looking at the passengers with an air that one could have described as melancholic.  
Then she laid on the side and began to roll on the ground and rub her snout against a rock while letting out some cooing-like sounds, which raised some " _Oh, too cute!_ " or " _Look! It's almost like she is greeting us._ " from the visitors.

"Ah Philippa…" Walter said, laughing. "Don't let yourself be fooled because she's a sly one. Well, we have to leave them now. The tour goes on!"

They left Metriacanthosaurs Hill and followed the road which forked southward, returned under the trees for the umpteenth time but they barely drove on a few dozen meters that they heard the sound of vegetation being trampled.

Wary, Walter slowed down and stopped the truck while the noise was getting closer and in the oppressive silence of the jungle, they heard a trunk being smashed behind the wall of thick vegetation on the edge of the road.  
Something big was coming.

A huge leg, as straight and thick as a trunk, appeared in front of the truck. It was followed by a second and a body of gargantuan proportions covered with brown scales and so bulky that it obstructed the view of the passengers.  
At each of its steps, the owner of the legs stomped the ground with the same power as drop hammer striking hot iron and facing the giant that was moving in front of them, the visitors held their breath.  
Thanks to the long neck that started from the body to disappear above the treetops, they knew that it was a mamenchisaur.  
Like a sovereign followed by his suite, he was accompanied by a procession of small animals. Gleaning the debris of vegetation left in the wake of the sauropod, there was a small troop of dryosaurs and small birds fluttered around the titan, sometimes landing on it to pick skin parasites, while perched on the back, there was a family of Mantled howlers. The youngsters were having fun climbing up the neck of the sauropod.

"They too are doing their little safari," one of the passengers commented, amused.

Once the long-neck passed, Walter put the key on the ignition and hearing the sound of the engine, the dryosaurs moved away from the road and the visitors continued their safari.


	38. He is the jungle

On one of the roads running through the Reserve, Niall was driving at breakneck speed while at the back of the jeep, Velasquez was administrating first aid to the unconscious worker whose feet were resting on the Costa Rican guard's lap.

When Velasquez applied a piece of cotton dipped in alcohol on one of the wounds, Escarcéga woke up and let out a moan. He grabbed Velasquez's arm as firmly as he could and looked at him straight in the eyes before starting to speak in Spanish.

"Your colleagues at the fence, they must be warned," he said.

"They already know she's around. She can try to attack the fence! She will get a ten-thousand volts shock and go back to the jungle while whining like a puppy," Niall retorted.

The worker coughed and then added:

"The white monster. Not a dinosaur, not even an animal. A scourge from another world. His eyes! His eyes full of malice and cruelty. He captured me at the foot of the volcano before releasing me in the jungle on the way and following me. I had almost reached the gate when he decided to take me back and inflict this on me before he released me again, so I can walk to you…"

"I do not question the truth behind our friend's story," said Niall, "but it doesn't make any sense! Why release a prey caught after so much effort if it's just to claw its belly and let it return to the others of his species."

"Out of sadism or playfulness? Like a cat with a mouse," Velasquez wondered.

"Maybe, but that doesn't explain why she didn't attack you while you were at her mercy. She could have charged you, ram the gate and disappear into the Reserve but she didn't. Why?"

"I haven't the answer but I must recognize that it scares me…" Velasquez replied.

Escarcéga began to talk again but his breathing was becoming more and more wheezing and his complexion was livid.

"You never should have saved me because by doing this, you just have doomed many other lives."

"Why?" Velasquez asked him in Spanish.

"He's the Devil himself. He will make this island his kingdom on Earth. Deception and ruse will be the means by which he will reach his ends. Beware! He is the jungle..."

Velasquez wanted to ask him what he meant by that but the worker's abdomen no longer rose along his breath and the guard looked for a pulse. He didn't find any and when he leaned an ear over Escarcéga's mouth, he heard no sound. Life had abandoned Elias Escarcéga.

Seeing Niall giving a concerned glance towards him, Velasquez just shook his head, which had a grim look. He made the sign of the cross and closed the eyes of the worker.

"Fuck!" Niall swore before hitting the dashboard.

Although they had noticed the large number of wounds and bruises dotting the worker's body when they had laid him on the seat, they had still hoped to keep him alive, at least until their arrival at the veterinary hospital.  
But because of the brutality with which the Indominus had transported and then rough Escarcéga up, he must had some internal bleeding that had been fatal to him.  
Despite the fact that he was a complete stranger in the eyes of the two guards, the death of Escarcéga still undermined their morale because they thought they had failed and took it personally, their duty having always been to save or help saving lives even before joining the Guard.  
Looking ahead, Niall sighed before taking the car's radio in his right hand to inform Hamada of Elias Escarcéga's death.

"Captain? The worker croaked."

" _You did what you could_ ," Hamada told him. " _Bring his body to Sector One then return to the Limes. We are all gathered there_."

"Copy that. Forrester, over."

Niall put the radio back in its stand and focused on the road in the middle of the meadows that stretched around them.

"He is the jungle? What did he meant?" He wondered.


	39. Panic

After crossing the road in front of the truck driven by Walter, the mamenchisaur had joined a small clearing with a pond in its middle. The sauropod didn't seemed to be bothered by the young monkey who had climbed up to the back of his head, from where it could enjoy a breath-taking view of the surroundings and even see over the canopy.

When the mamenchisaur lowered his neck to drink, the monkey returned to its family, whose members were busy delousing each other, and the dryosaurs behind scattered around the sauropod to dig the ground, searching for tubers and even insects that supplemented their feeding. Intermittently, they raised their heads to watch the jungle around.  
They had come to this clearing many times before and they knew they were close to a den of predators because when the wind was blowing eastward, it brought their smell to the clearing. Whenever the dryosaurs came here, they were nervous and they soon had learned to follow the long-necks to benefit not only of their protection but also of the scraps of their meal. Actually, it was also a beneficial association for the mamenchisaurs since they had not a very good eyesight and the dryosaurs having sharp senses, those were better in detecting threats than them and could warn the mamenchisaurs in time. Until then, they had never been attacked. Was it because the long-neck frightened the predators or because Man had erected a barrier between them and the herbivores as some of the most brave dryosaurs had noticed when they ventured westward ?  
It seemed like it was the latter because once, one of them saw the metriacanthosaurs watching them from behind the fence, yelping with frustration, without trying to get around it, as if they knew that were penned.  
Despite this, the instinct of the dryosaurs always told them to be on the look-out and on this gloomy day, it helped them to detect in time the threat that was lurking in the shadow of the jungle. When it turned its head to the northeast, one of the sentinels smelled a pungent odour of rotten flesh, similar to those of metriacanthosaurs but stronger: There was another kind of predator around.

It was the first time that the sentinel smelled such an odour but the most worrying was the direction from which it came. The wind was blowing from the northeast and therefore, the unknown predator was somewhere over there, on the same side of the barrier as they were.  
Eyes wide open, the sentinel looked towards the trees in the northeast and thanks to her sharp sight, it saw a red eye with an oval pupil watching them, half-hidden behind the foliage, and immediately, the sentinel produced a high-pitched call that sounded like the mix between a goose's reedy call and a goat's alarmed bleat.  
When they heard this alarm call, all the dryosaurs jumped at the same time to seek refuge between the legs of the mamenchisaur while the monkeys stopped their delousing to also look towards the trees that the dryosaur sentinel was fixing a second earlier.  
Seeing a titanic beast with a pale scaly skin, long sharp claws and big jaws emerging from the jungle, they produced a concert of panicked sounds and the mothers called their little ones which went to cling on their bellies or backs.

Wondering what was causing this racket, the mamenchisaur turned its head and seeing in its turn what had just stepped in the clearing, panic seized it since it had never meet a creature as frightening and aggressive as the one which was threateningly roaring at it and whose appearance was telling every being that crosses its path the same thing: Flee, flee while you can.  
While the monkeys sought to get off the sauropod, it raised its neck to put it out of reach of the predator's jaws and before the mamenchisaur fled, it launched a powerful bellow that was heard throughout the north of the Reserve and beyond.

Noticing that even the mighty mamenchisaur was scared, the dryosaurs immediately abandoned it but as they fled, one of them fell in the pond and the more it struggled to get out, letting out frightened bleating, the more it was getting bogged down.  
When it saw the legs of the mamenchisaur advancing quickly towards it, the dryosaur had a burst of adrenaline and fought to extricate itself but by doing so, it went under the water surface and an immeasurable weight fell on its body, breaking its bones into pieces and reducing its internal organs to a pulp.

When it raised the front leg which had fallen on the unfortunate dryosaur, the mamenchisaur revealed only a disjointed and bloody mass of flesh and bones half buried under the mud in a murky and now reddish water.  
The dryosaur was now only good for the least difficult scavengers, not a giant predator which was used to be fed with relatively clean meat or carcasses and not soiled ones by the dirt that was found in abundance beyond the walls it had lived during these past months.

X

"What was that noise?" One of the guards asked when they heard the bellow at the gate.

In addition to Tian, Turner and Hamada's group which had followed the I. rex's tracks up to the edge of the clearing in front of the gate, there was also Glenmore and a part of the mounted guards as well as Laurence. The Pegasus had landed nearby, in the middle of a patch of bended grass.

"Sounds like a mamenchi but the only time I heard them produce such a sound was on Sorna," Drekanson answered.

"You're right, it's an alarm call," Hamada recalled. "Erin, take Darbinian and go see what it's all about."

The pilot and the ranger ran towards the Pegasus and climbed inside the helicopter.

While it was taking off, Darbinian grabbed a harness underneath he seats and put it over her before fixing it to the aircraft through a snap hook. She sat at the edge of the cabin, with her feet resting on the footboard.  
Without any further delay, the helicopter flew to the west, where the bellow seemed to have been launched.  
The ranger seized a pair of binoculars and scanned the horizon, searching an eventual mammenchisaur neck raising above the treetops.

"There!" She shouted when she saw the searched animal. "At thirteen o'clock! About eight hundred meters west of the gate. It looks like it is fleeing something."

Through the lenses of binoculars, Darbinian saw the trees being lied down on the sauropod's path, which leaved only trampled vegetation in its wake, but when she recognized the outlines of a sloping paddock farther ahead, her eyes opened wide out of stupor.

"It's heading towards the metris paddock…"

" _Darbinian. Prepare your rifle and take aim. If it keeps that direction and pace and doesn't stop, get ready to shoot as soon as I give the order_ ," Brunet commanded in her ear piece.

"Copy that."

However, Darbinian and Laurence were so focused on their pursuit of the mamenchisaur that when they flew over the clearing it was fleeing, they did not see a large white biped creature disappearing under the dense foliage, surprised and frightened by the sounds of the aircraft.

X

" _Control. I ask the authorisation to cull one of the animals. And it's not the Indominus…_ "

This request from Lieutenant Brunet surprised everyone in the control room, specifically Masrani to which the idea was highly displeasing judging by his frowning look.  
Moments earlier, the technician in charge of the monitoring of the Reserve, a young woman with brown curly hair and a pair of glasses named Katie Adamson, had seen the notification " _DRYO 042 – SIGNAL LOST_ " appear on her working station's screen, informing her that the signal transmitted by the implant of the dryosaur numbered forty-two was no longer received by the _Mascom Network_ satellite that was used to watch over Isla Nublar and the Five Deaths and thus, could not be retransmitted to Jurassic World's control room.  
This could only mean two things: Either said dryosaur had gone to a place where the signal could not emit, which was the most imaginable and plausible solution, either its implant had been destroyed.  
Since the Indominus escape was a matter of greater concern, the technician had not been really startled by the notification and she didn't even bother to check the last location of the implant but if she did, she would have noticed thanks to the GPS coordinates recorded by the implant that the dryosaur numbered forty-two was in the middle of a clearing in the northern part of the Reserve, in an environment in which the signal could have been transmitted without any problems and Adamson would have quickly realize that something serious must had happened to the dryosaur if its implant was destroyed.

"Why?" Cruthers asked with a hesitating voice.

" _Look at the real-time map, on the northernmost parts of the Reserve and especially the area between the gap's gate and the metris_ ," Brunet told him urgently.

After Cruthers gave her a brief nod, Adamson showed on the big screen a real-time map of the Reserve, bounded on it by a thick black line and with hundreds of bright dots scattered across it.  
She followed the indications of the French guard and zoomed to the area he mentioned. They saw a bright dot going westwards, advancing inexorably toward Metriacanthosaurs Hill.

" _You see the dot that's heading towards them_ ," Brunet continued, " _it's fifty fucking tons of mamenchi that's going straight to their fence!_ "

Adamson pressed on a key and a code titled " _MAMENCH 003_ " appeared over the dot to accompany it along its trajectory, confirming Brunet's claims and several let out exclamations of astonishment.

"Lord..." Dearing said, struggling to realize the situation.

"Mr Masrani? Claire? What is your order?" Cruthers asked.

Neither of them answered right away and following Masrani's remontrances of earlier, Dearing did not dare to take the initiative to allow the guards to shot the animal out of the fear of bringing upon her Masrani's anger as she knew he was particularly sensitive on the matter and therefore she looked at him desperately, waiting for his opinion.

Barely three seconds passed that Brunet became impatient:

" _Well I'm not going to wait a hundred and seven years until you decide so whether we're authorised or not, we will take the necessary measure for you if we must before we have seven more free carnivores!_ " He threatened.

Seeing Masrani pondering while stroking his beard nervously, the director decided to take action before a point of no return is reached and after taking a deep breath, she finally gave an answer to Brunet:

"Authorization granted," she declared loudly, though hesitantly.

" _Copy that_ ," Brunet said coldly. " _It's up to you now, Darbinian_."

The guards put an end to their transmission and the footage of the Pegasus on-board cameras appeared on the main screen, showing the Russian ranger leaning out of the cabin in order to be able to take aim while the distance between the helicopter and the long neck that rose over the canopy like a shark fin above water was getting shorter.

While the technicians held their breath, Dearing dared to look at Masrani. His face was tensed but on the moment, the most intimidating thing about him was his furious eyes that fixed the director. He stared at her for a moment before saying, in a surprisingly calm way:

"Claire. I made a promise to Hammond. I told him that I would not let any of the animals living in Jurassic World be killed if that could be avoided, a promise that you swept away."

"If I was hired, it is to ensure the good management of this park and that includes its security which is now threatened by this panicked mamenchisaur," Dearing retorted, "so with all due respect sir, excuse me for wanting to do my job properly and not rehash out of nostalgia promises made twenty years ago to a doddering old man on his deathbed."

As much as the first part of his sentence had been thought out in a way to be as polite as possible, the second was said in irritation and haste, and Dearing only realized afterwards the impudence and the cruelty of her words about late John Hammond.  
Everyone was shocked by this irreverent statement from the park director of Jurassic World which instilled a deep sense of unease in the room and someone even let out in a whisper of disbelief:

"I'm having a bad trip, couldn't be anything else."

Feeling insulted, Masrani was smouldering and his fist was tightly clenched while the deformed features of his face were indicating that he struggled to not scream in anger like a madman.

"If you have so little consideration for the one who was like a second father to me and whose vision's results is the reason why you are standing there today, why wouldn't you take a flight for Scotland right now to go urinate on his grave?" He retorted sharply.

Dearing, straight as a ramrod, blushed out of shame, and she looked away to not endure Masrani's wrath frontally.

"Did this answer made you feel uncomfortable or have you already lost your rashness? Yes, I am humiliating you, much to my regret, but do not act as if I didn't warn you and know that your insult won't be left unpunished. You already had two breach this morning, there won't be a third!" He warned her, speaking in an imperious tone.

X

As soon as Dearing gave her authorization, Hamada asked to Darbinian:

" _Do it humanly. A headshot_ ,"

"Well, I don't have the choice. If I shoot elsewhere, it will feel absolutely nothing since it will be the equivalent of sending a toothpick on a crocodile. Ugh… Why didn't we brought the anti-tank rifle?" She mumbled while the Pegasus was closing the distance between them and their target.

They quickly were at the level of the mamenchisaur, flying over the canopy, and she adjusted her shooting angle and aimed for the sauropod's head before taking a long inspiration and then said, with a touch of bitterness:

"I'm sorry big boy..."

As she exhaled, she pulled the trigger, heard the gunshot and felt the sharp recoil of the rifle against her shoulder.

Darbinian waited for a few seconds and noticing that the mamenchisaur was still advancing as if nothing happened, she exclaimed:

"It's hard-headed or what!?"

But as she was about to shoot again, a series of hoarse calls were heard from the jungle below.  
It was an _Ornitholestes_ and Darbinian thought that he must have been scared by the mamenchisaur or the helicopter, but in doing so, the arboreal carnivore scared in its turn other animals and more particularly a flight of white birds that suddenly took off in front of the Pegasus, forcing Laurence to make a brutal side manoeuvre.  
Thanks to her experience during her years in the Royal Australian Air Force, the pilot managed to avoid a collision with the birds but during the process, Darbinian failed her shot, lost her balance and fell, letting out a swear.

Without the harness that held her suspended, she would have fallen through the foliage and broke her back or her neck on some branch and then land on the ground in an unceremonious way and before her comrades could find her body, scavengers would have feast on her body.  
She barely caught her rifle by the butt and when she managed to climb back inside the helicopter's cabin, she began to yell at the pilot, omitting totally the fact that she was more ranked than her:

"Dammit, Erin! What the fuck are you doing? You want to make me puke or what? You know very well that I don't like being shaken!"

"Oh, don't yell at me for fuck's sake! It's the fault of these damn birds which almost went straight through the blades!"

"They could have move out of the way!"

" _Darbinian!_ " Hamada shouted, annoyed by the two women's squabble and getting impatient. " _At the speed with which it's getting closer to the fence, you may not have a third chance!_ "

"I would have it for sure if our dear bush bird wasn't thinking she was flying an _F-16_ in the middle of a dogfight!" Darbinian grumbled as she was repositioning. "If I hurry in readjusting my firing angle, I'm sure I can have it on time. May I be cursed if I fail!"

She aimed again at the head of the mamenchisaur and pulled the trigger for a third time, mentally crossing fingers for a successful shot.  
When the dinosaur let out a bellow of pain, Darbinian began to breathe a sigh of relief before she realized that if the bullet had reached the brain as it should have, the animal would have drop dead immediately, which meant that in this situation, the bullet went to lodge itself in the skull but didn't touched the brain, triggering an excruciating pain instead of a death so quick that it was painless.

The mamenchisaur arrived right in front of the fence of the metiacanthosaurs paddock and she watched him stand briefly on its hind legs before trampling with its front ones the obstacle across its path.  
The enormous legs hit the fence with force and under the strong pressure exerted over them, the steel posts broke as if they were only planks of wood and a whole section of the fence collapsed.  
Even if Darbinian wanted to shot on the mamenchisaur a fourth time, she wouldn't have been fast enough and if ever she would have succeeded in time, the mamenchisaur may have collapse on the fence, making her action futile.  
As the mamenchisaur entered the paddock, Darbinian hit the metal of the helicopter with anger and frustration, cursing herself in Russian, as if she wanted to evacuate the bitter feeling she had in her mouth.

Darbinian hated the feel of failure and had always worked hard to avoid it, as her excellent results at the academy could testify, and when they she was still part of the special forces, few were the targets that could escape her bullets and Darbinian wasn't above shooting in the legs to make sure that they couldn't run away, an habit that she had mentioned only to people she really trusted since she left Russia and joined the Guard.

The mamenchisaur did not even cross half of the paddock that it let out another panicked bellow before starting to turn around as fast as it could, rather slowly actually because of the great length of its neck and of its tail that limited his manoeuvre.  
The metriacanthosaurs had been suddenly awakened by the excessive noise nearby and were now slowly approaching the sauropod, surprised to see the long-neck inside their paddock.  
Judging by their insecure behaviour towards the sauropod, one could have thought that the carnosaurs were more cautiously curious than hungry and they had a sufficiently developed sense of self-preservation to know that the creature that had entered their home was a prey way too big and powerful for them.  
Although they were actually trying to get around it, the sauropod was still frightened and it panicked when they bypassed it, thinking that the metriacanthosaurs would attack it on its sides.

When the predators noticed the gaping breach behind the intruder, they ran to it in order to move away from the mamenchisaur and stopped briefly at the former boundary of their paddock, like if they were hesitating to leave their life of ease behind them.  
However, caught between the scared long-neck and the metal bird was spitting whistling pebbles, they were forced to rush towards the trees, avoiding the legs of the colossus and the bullets at the same time before escaping into the jungle.


	40. Attack on the road

The truck had stopped in a meadow, in the middle of a herd of _Parasaurolophus_ to which were mixed a group of a dozen of grey-blue _Triceratops_ as well as some _Gallimimus_ and dryosaurs which, as the visitors could have seen several times earlier, were frolicking around the larger herbivores, looking for leftovers, a behaviour which had earned this species and other small ornithopods with the same feeding strategy the nickname of gleaners.

The group had left the safari village far behind them over an hour earlier and despite the fact that watching dinosaurs living their own lives in a semi-free environment was something quite exciting, Zach and a few other passengers were getting bored.  
Walter was a very friendly guide and a large part of his audience, especially Gray, had been charmed by his old cowboy look, deep voice, sense of humour and the catching passion that the man had for his job but during some explanations, he had sometimes the tendency of enlarge on the subject like at this moment as he was explaining to the passengers what zoopharmacognosy was by using as an example some of the _Parasaurolophus_ which were eating clay at the edges of a small waterhole.  
However, the eyes of many members of the group were either focused on the Shetland pony's sized young _Triceratops_ which were playing next to the adults at the eastern edge, or on the two adolescent male _Parasaurolophus_ that were fighting in the distance, standing on their hind legs and kicking each other with the front ones, bellowing from time to time.

"Geophagy, the action of eating earth or clay, is a kind of zoopharmacognosy," Walter told them. "If you see these _Parasaurolophus_ eating clay, it's because we think they do it so that the clay, once in the digestive system, absorbs the toxins contained in the leaves they eat. It's a behavior that has already been seen in several modern animal species, more specifically some mammals of Central African forests…"

He was cut in the middle of his explanation by the sudden crackling of the radio in which a woman's voice passed a message.

"C _ontrol's here._ _To all trucks located between the Western Valley and the ruins of the old center, we have a code 15 for this area. If you are there, prepare to leave. Guards are on their way to escort you._ "

Walter apologised to his passengers and removed the radio from its stand to answer.

"Copy that, control."

At the mention of Code 15, Walter's playful face had decomposed.  
In the park's jargon, code 15 was synonymous with the escape of dangerous animals and all visitors and non-essential employees were asked to evacuate the area where the animals in question were on the run.

The guide exhaled then inhaled, forced a smile and turned to the visitors to inform them of the situation. He didn't want to scare them however and was ready to hide informations or even lie for their own good.

"Your attention, dear visitors. Following a little technical hold-up, we have to leave this part of the Reserve to go south, which means we won't pass near the old visitor center as originally planned. I apologize for this but be assured, the tour is not over, far from it and there is still much to see…" he said with his cheerful tone back.

The visitors were disappointed by the news and resumed their observation of the animals while waiting for the guards.

In the tenth row, the last one, the group of young people had taken place. Two of them were pointing to the _Parasaurolophus_ behind the truck.

"Those duckbills are so adorable!" The auburn-haired girl exclaimed, the one that spoke of Bucephalus in the waiting queue. "Come on, let's take a selfie with them!" She said with enthusiasm to her blonde friend, who was sitting next to her.

"Yeah," she approved.

One of them took out her cell phone and positioned it in such a way to take a selfie including them and the _Parasaurolophus_ behind, but when she was ready to take the picture, an idea crossed the mind of the auburn-haired girl.

"Wait, are you thinking to what I think?"

The blonde replied with a nod, then both of them pressed their lips together as in a pout and sucked-in cheeks, making their mouths look like duck bills, and took the selfie.

"Duck faces with duckbills, no one can say to us that this photo is not in the theme of the visit," the auburn-haired girl said proudly.

"Yeah, it's so original on top of that," the blonde added.

Embarrassed, Chris, their companion with long curly hairs who was sitting at the other end of the bench seat, covered his face with the palm of his hand but when he saw through his fingers a trio of mounted guards emerging from the jungle, he lowered his hand and looked at them with great interest while they were trotting towards the truck.  
The riders passed among the _Parasaurolophus_ but avoided the _Triceratops_ , those being known for their unpredictable behaviour, especially when juveniles were around.  
The other passengers noticed the trio too and some chatted in a low voice while looking at them.

"Mommy, do you see the knights?" A child even asked to his mother.

She explained to him that the coming riders weren't exactly knights although in the eyes of a child, the mounted guards looked like horsemen from a period film because of their rather unusual helmets and the sheathed sabres they were carrying on their backs.

When they arrived at their level, one of the riders stopped by the cabin and Walter lowered his window pane to talk to him.

Curious, Gray tried to listen to the conversation but in vain since the two men were speaking in a very low voice and he didn't understand a word, although he thought he heard "Metris" at a moment.

Their guide raised his window pane and his interlocutor went to stand in front of the truck while his two companions were positioning themselves on the sides.  
Walter restarted the truck and they left the meadow escorted by the mounted guards.

When they came back under the shadows of the trees, the cracking of a branch near the western edge alerted several of the grazing _Parasaurolophus_.  
The crested duckbills raised their heads to listen for a few seconds before returning to their occupations.

As the road ahead led them south, snaking through the jungle, the girls in the back row wanted to check the selfie they had taken a few moments earlier.  
When they saw a white spot among the foliage of the trees in the background, they thought at first that it was an impurity on the picture but by looking closer, they noticed that it wasn't one.

"What is that thing?" The blonde asked, pointing the spot. "Looks like a dino's head," she noticed when they made a first zoom.

"I think it's one," confirmed his friend, "entirely white but I don't know what it can be."

"You could look on the panel," Chris suggested.

"But I did!" She retorted. "It's not on it."

The auburn-haired girl had looked at the panel above the row in front of theirs but none of the featured species matched with the mysterious animal in the picture, either because the colour, the size or the shape of the head was wrong.

"Give me your phone, I'll check this," Chris said.

She passed her smartphone to him.

"Yeah, enlighten us, Mr. specialist."

While Chris was looking at the picture, the fourth member of their group, the muscular tanned blond young man, looked at the rider trotting to their right.  
He saw that blinkers partially covered the vision of the horse and that the rider had a rifle in a sheath on the saddle and a horn over the shoulder. It was similar in look to the ivory ones that some characters had in period or fantasy films and he wondered which was the use of such a medieval instrument in a cutting-edge dinosaur park.

The truck followed a bend, crossed a stream and passed in front of some fig trees.  
The road ahead seemed to continue in a straight line, flanked on both sides by a seemingly impenetrable curtain of vegetation. One could hear what was probably some kind of large animal moving further behind said curtain.

"Uh guys, I think I know why we are being escorted," Chris declared with a serious look on his face after he looked at the picture, and especially at the outlines of the head that was watching them from behind the foliage.

"Tell us," one of his companions said while the source of the sounds behind the vegetation seemed to get closer.

By zooming in on the photo and despite the fact that the head was blurred because of the resolution, Chris had been able to notice that the head was the one of a carnivorous theropod dinosaur and a large one judging by the height at which it was, some four and a half meters above the ground he had deduced by comparing with the trees around.  
His friend was right, the dinosaur was not on the panel, meaning it wasn't one of the Reserve, not even one that lived in a separate paddock like the metriacanthosaurs, and more disturbing, it wasn't even in the park's guide book. But the scariest thing about the picture was that it seemed to be watching them…

"Because of that!" He replied, suddenly raising his voice at the end of his sentence while pointing to large white shape that was moving fast behind the curtain of dense vegetation on the right side of the road.

In the blink of an eye, the large white dinosaur seen in the picture burst out of the vegetation, opened wide its jaws to close them on the leading rider and his horse before throwing the body of the latter on the truck's windshield that cracked around the point of impact.  
Walter abruptly applied the brakes and the visitors screamed when they heard the panicked neighs, the gunshots and the growls of the monster. Only its general shape could be seen behind the blood left by the half-devoured body of the horse when it slide from the windshield.  
The guard on their right took his horn and blew it a first time, then a second, producing a sound that could easily be confused with the call of a duckbill dinosaur.

X

"They have a problem on the plateau's road," Glenmore realized when they heard the second blast coming from the jungle south of the Limes.

But when the horn was blown a third time, they turned pale.

Horns of the Guard have never been blown more than twice on Isla Nublar, but in the Five Deaths archipelago on the other hand, it had happened several times before due to the inherent danger of the guards' missions there.  
In the event of an attack or a skirmish with the prehistoric fauna of these islands or poachers and other armed intruders, the Guard had developed a warning protocol that allowed the immediate call of reinforcements without having to use radio waves, which can be disturbed by interferences, or phones, since there was little to no signal in this isolated region.  
Thus, it adopted the use of horns. Each patrol had one and the sound produced by the instrument sounded like a hadrosaur call, allowing the horn blow to be relatively unnoticed among the sounds of the jungle and recognized only by the guards.

Hearing this third blast, Glenmore jumped and then ran towards his men.

"Back on your horses! They are attacked!" He shouted at the top of his lungs.

While Hamada was calling back the Pegasus so it can take the guards of Brunet's platoon to which he ordered to bring back the vehicles they left at the clearing near San Fernandez, the riders of Glenmore's one who had dismounted got back on their horses and the Scotsman almost jumped on his saddle before taking the head of his platoon and lead it to the jungle.

They spurred their mounts and those galloped towards the trees.

X

Once he had blown his horn three times, the guard grabbed his rifle and shouted to Water to get out of there. He then started to shoot at the great white dinosaur while struggling to control his horse. His companions and their horses were already dead, lying in the middle of the dead leaves covering the road and he knew that attacking the monster alone was a doomed enterprise, but he had to win the truck some time so it can escape.

Walter complied and the truck began to turn around while shots were fired, starting the panicked and sobbing passengers.  
Then the shots stopped and they heard the bones of the last member of their escort being crushed under the jaws of the monster.

The vehicle barely had the time to finish its U-turn that it stayed on the spot despite the fact that Walter was putting his foot down.  
The wheels were indeed spinning and scrubbing dirt from the road, the truck wasn't moving.  
The group of young people at the rear turned and jumped when they saw that the white dinosaur was standing behind the truck, holding it with its large hands ended by talons-like claws.  
The right hand was gripped to the doors of the last two rows while the left one was on the bars behind the last row and looking at them with horror, some of the passengers noticed that the hands had four fingers each and that the first digit, which strongly resembled a thumb, had a curves sickle-like claw of a length of around sixty centimetres, the largest of all.

The fingers of the left hand tightened around the bars, the dinosaur tugged at the bars and pulled them brutally before throwing them aside but taking advantage of the fact that their attacker was now only holding the vehicle with one hand, Walter engaged the reverse gear and the truck suddenly moved backwards.  
They hit the white dinosaur and surprised, it lost its balance and let go.  
The guide engaged the first gear, fully put his foot down, and the wheels spun at full speed, sending dirt and dead leaves at the face of the laying dinosaur, then the truck moved forwards and Walter engaged the second gear.

He had the impression of being the captain of a ship sailing in a storm. His brain was working fast and he felt that all gazes were turned towards him. When he glanced in the central mirror, he saw a small glimmer of hope appear in the eyes of his passengers.  
These people were counting on him to get out of this ambush alive and in no case he would let failed them.

They drove over about forty meters before the enormous mass of the dinosaur charged them laterally.  
The bars of the doors deformed under the impact and the truck deviated from its trajectory, threatening to crash into one of the fig trees on the side of the road.  
At the very last moment, Walter braked and turned the wheel to the right but the knobbly and thick roots of the fig tree spread on the ground all around the tree and the bonnet suddenly rose when the front wheels passed over one of them.  
The truck bounced, shaking the visitors badly, and when the rear wheels tried to pass over the obstacle in their turn, they remained stuck behind.  
The beast slowly advanced towards the cabin where Walter was finally seized by panic.  
Seeing that the guards called by the three horns blows were late to arrive, he grabbed the radio and with his trembling hands, turned the buttons in order to find the frequency for the emergency calls.

When the radio's statics stopped and someone was heard speaking in an audible way, Walter put the radio near his mouth but as pressed the button to communicate, something hit the windshield above the driver's seat.  
The cracks created by the projection of the horse's body on the panel widened and a network of other smaller cracks appeared around the impact site before the windshield shattered into a thousand of small pieces.  
The passengers saw Walter put his arms in front of his eyes to protect himself from the debris but as soon as the jingling of their fall in all of the cabin stopped, a huge mouth suddenly entered in the latter and closed its jaws on the poor Walter before retreating as quickly as it entered.  
Within the blink of an eye, their guide had disappeared, and the only radio of the vehicle with him.

Without a driver to manoeuvre the truck in which they were stuck, the passengers panic increased and when they saw the muscular legs, the long arms and the lower part of the dinosaur's belly skirting the hood and then pass next to the vehicle, almost brushing it, with the same patience of a shark circling its prey, some began to shout.

Intrigued, the beast lowered its head a little, revealing to the passengers only a part of her elongated snout, moderately narrow but a little widened at its end and covered with a layer of keratin, as well as its lower jaw that slightly curved upwards.  
The passengers saw that at its end, the upper jaw formed a hook covering some of the teeth at the front and which, when the mouth was closed, placed itself in front of the lower jaw's end and evoked a bit the sharp beak of a predatory bird.  
Stretching from the lower jaw to the throat, there was a dewlap lined with spines, of a blood-red colour, just like the lips, the lower jaw, the throat and the upper part of the breast.  
The passengers also observed that the lower jaw, the back of the legs, the sides of the belly, the tip of the tail and the back were lined with spiky protrusions.

The beast began to sniffle and then drew her lips back and opened its jaws, like if it wanted to smell and taste their fear, and in doing so, it partially revealed to its preys the inside of its mouth and showed them its rows of curved and crenelated teeth between which pieces of flesh were stuck. But the most striking feature of its dentition consisted of three sets of tusk-like caniniform teeth that projected above and below the skull, one of which in the lower jaw fits into notches in the upper jaw, and the longest of these caniniform teeth were the length of a dagger.

Seeing that the beast was heading towards the back of the truck where the youths were no longer protected by the bars, the other passengers shouted to them to not stay there.  
The youths got up and began to pass over the bench seats in front of them, jostling the passengers sitting there.

As he had his hands put on top of the eighth bench seat, the blond man screamed and dig his nails in the seat when he felt an immense weight crushing his legs.  
The jaws in which they had disappeared pulled him so violently out of the vehicle that one of the passengers of the ninth row was knocked out when the young man's elbow hit his temple.  
The companions of the victim watched him being thrown like a rattle further away and noticing that the dinosaur did not even go to the lifeless body of their friend, they realized that it wasn't attacking because he was hungry, but rather because it allowed it to unwind. They knew it was going to kill them all.

The jaws reappeared in the empty space left by the bars and opened before closing on the back seat and pulling it out of the vehicle, enlarging the opening through which it could now reach its preys.  
They were aware of this and went to take refuge in the front part of the truck and didn't hesitate to climb over each other like pigs in the narrow corridor of a slaughterhouse in their attempt to escape the jaws that obstructed the opening in the back of the truck.  
Behind the multitude of gesticulating limbs, Gray saw for a short moment the eyes of the beast staring at them.

Having seen its prey abandon the last rows of the vehicle, the dinosaur took out its head and walked along the right side of the truck before grabbing with its right hand the door of the fifth row and tear it off.  
Then, by biting the roof of the truck and holding it with its arms, the beast tipped the vehicle slightly towards it.  
Inside, the passengers all slid down along their respective bench seats and the rightmost ones felt the weight of all the others pressing their bodies against the door and its bars.  
However, the passengers in the fifth row slipped out of the vehicle and fell at the feet of the dinosaur with even one of them nearly taking with him the passenger from the row back of theirs who had caught him by the collar.  
The beast released the truck and began to kill one by one the four passengers it had managed to get out.

It trampled the one who was crawling near its leg, clawed the back of another, and when its saw the other two running away, a disturbing scene happened: The slowest fugitive suddenly stopped in his run while he was out of reach of the claws and the jaws of the monster.  
He knelt on the ground, blood came out of his mouth and when he looked at his chest, he saw a long, rigid, fleshy appendage with a barbed tip running through his abdomen like a javelin. As he agonized, the passenger was lifted and the last thing he saw was his legs floating above the ground and the last alive passenger of the fifth row still running.  
Those inside the truck watched astonished the appendage bringing the body up to where the monster's maw was.

The dinosaur swallowed its victim and then began to repeat the operation performed on the fifth row's door on the one of the fourth row but seized by frenzy, it acted even more brutally than before.  
Once the door was teared off, it did not hesitate to tip the truck more and introduce its hand inside in the manner of a glutton child trying to grab candies at the bottom of a jar to pick the passengers of the fourth row, a Chinese family, as well as a few others and forcefully expel them out of the vehicle.  
The father and his eight-year-old daughter were killed in front of the mother and their other child, a boy of about five.  
The mother then took their son in her arms and followed the other fugitives towards the thickets further away in front of the truck.

Once they knew that their turn had come, Zach pulled Gray by the arm to take him to the other side of the vehicle.  
While the beast was tearing off the door and sinking its teeth into the roof, they passed over the passengers on their left, but the eldest boy had barely the time to shout at his younger brother to hang on the bars that the truck was once again tipped.  
Gray did not have the time to hang on and he also would have slide out of the vehicle if Zach hadn't held him against him with his left arm while his right hand was firmly gripped around one of the bars.  
The young man saw the passengers of the rows that still had their right doors slide to be squashed like sardines against the bars while the giant hand had sank one of its claws in the back of one of the passengers of their row that was trying to grab Zach's leg so he would hang on to the bars too.  
Said passenger only uttered a muffled cry when the tip of the claw pierced his lung, then he let himself be dragged against the aisle and first be pulled out of the vehicle and then upwards where his bones were broke between the jaws of the dinosaur.  
Still hanging at his bar, Zach felt the pain quickly gaining the muscles of his outstretched arm and the fact that he was desperately holding Gray against him did not help at all to calm it, it was actually the opposite.

When it was going to no longer be bearable, he winced and clenched his teeth but nothing worked, the pain became so strong that he felt with horror his fingers slowly loosen their hold around the bar. In a few moments, they would let go and he and his brother would slide straight out.  
The young man thought for a second that they could get up and run to escape the claws, jaws, and the strange appendix, then he saw the bodies of those that the monster had killed and noticed that the few that had been able to escape were already far.  
Their chances of escape were close to null.  
As he was about to let go, a loud, prolonged horn blow was heard and the monster, distracted, put the vehicle back on its wheels, released it and turned to the north.

Hearing shots fired in the air, it growled and spread its arms, stomped the ground and its long tail covered with enlarged and spinose scales, like those of the lizards of the _Smaug_ genus.

A dozen of mounted guards, armed with rifles and electric spears, appeared from behind the road's bend, riding at full speed.  
When they saw the giant predator after crossing the creek, the horses suddenly stopped and neighed in panic with some even rearing up.  
Despite the distance between them and the riders, the passengers could see that they were terrified by the beast which, its back turned to the truck and her four limbs on the ground, snarled at them angrily.  
When the dinosaur arched its head back as if to prepare to charge, one of the riders in the centre of the group aimed at it and shouted:

"Fire!"

At the very moment when the rifles began to shoot in unison, the passengers flattened behind the seats in front of them or any other hard surface to take cover from the bullets.  
Some ricocheted against the frame of the vehicle but most of them reached the skin of the dinosaur.

However, they were ineffective against the latter, which acted as natural armour since it was made of a mosaic of thin scales lined here and there with larger bulbous scales that formed small series of parallel rows on the neck, the sides, the thighs and the front part of the tail while the scales of the back were also arranged in rows, but in closer ones and looked like those of crocodiles.

Instead of letting out a roar of pain, the dinosaur continued to snarl, like if it wanted to dissuade them from moving forward, then it suddenly raised its head and turned, retreating behind the vegetation through the breach it created on its wake when it ambushed the truck.

When the guard that ordered to fire on the dinosaur, a man with a moustache that looked like to be straight out of a Kipling novel and who the passengers assumed to be the leader of the riders, saw the mauled bodies of his colleagues further down the road, his face purpled with rage and he rode past the truck.  
Everyone thought for a moment that he was going to chase the dinosaur but once he reached the breach, the moustached man pulled on the reins of his horse and began to hurl insults and threats in Scottish Gaelic at the creature.


	41. Stampede

When Duncan Glenmore returned to his men, they started to hear a rumble in the distance and about thirty small green dinosaurs with brown striped backs burst out of the thickets in which the fugitives had disappeared during the attack of the Indominus.

They were fast and slender animals the size of a chicken, _Compsognathus_ , a species of small carnivorous dinosaur that lived at the end of the Jurassic in the tropical archipelago that later became Europe.  
InGen's clones were particularly known to be daring when they hunted in packs, not hesitating to attack prey the size of a human being if those were weakened due to injury or illness and to bite if they felt threatened.

But the individuals which were running in the direction of the horses were not hunting but fleeing something.  
Behind them, some White-nosed Coatis run out of the undergrowth while a few Geoffroy's spider monkeys barked as they jumped from tree to tree and a flight of birds flew over the ambush site.  
All thought at first that it was another sign from the volcano since they had felt the night before the magnitude 4.5 earthquake on the Richter scale that struck the island at around nine pm, but when something voluminous was heard tossing and laying the trees and trampling the vegetation at a fast speed in the north, it seemed like a tsunami was sweeping the island.  
But they were inland at an altitude of about one hundred and fifty meters, it couldn't be one unless it was of Biblical proportions, capable of flooding most of the island and inflict Jurassic World the same fate as the legendary Atlantis.

The horses, still on the edge after their confrontation with the Indominus, got scared when the _Compsognathus_ slalomed between their legs and one of the mares, which tended to be easily frightened, panicked.  
When she kicked, killing one of the _Compsognathus_ in a single blow, she almost struck the closest horse and its rider and send at his face the body of the little predator. The guard threw it directly on the ground and the dinosaurs chirped but they were immediately covered by shouting humans while the grumble was getting noisier.

To the surprise of all, the fugitives also came out of the thickets, running like mad towards the truck in order to climb back in it and shouting to the guards to get out the way. They were not the only ones to flee since several _Gallimimus_ and dryosaurs appeared in their turn and quickly passed the humans, slaloming between them and letting out scared cries. The mounted guards moved away from the way of the bipedal herbivores and saw that arriving last, there was the Chinese woman. She was still holding her son in her arms but she was out of breath and lagging behind.  
When the other fugitives almost reached the truck, she had just come out of the thickets and each of her strides seemed to hurt her.  
One of the guards, a young American named Jenkins, spurred his horse and rode toward them. His comrades tried to dissuade him but he did not listen to them. When he realized his mistake, it was too late.  
The mother had only run about twenty meters that a tsunami of flesh flattened the frailest trees and the thickets behind her.

Seeing the dinosaurian wave of _Parasaurolophus_ , _Triceratops_ , _Gallimimus_ and dryosaurs heading straight towards them, the same animals that the tourists had seen before the ambush, the mounted guards moved further aside but Jenkins was still riding towards the mother and her son, his right arm outstretched and ready to grab them.  
She knew he would never be able to save them in time, so she stopped, asked her son to hold her tight and close the eyes.  
As her owns were tearing, she closed them in her turn, hold her son against her and waited.  
Jenkins saw the herd caught up with them and mother and son were engulfed amid the cries and the yelps of the dinosaurs.  
When he turned in order to flee, something big charged his horse and Jenkins felt a horn running through his thigh.

As it was lifted by the _Triceratops_ which had just gored it in the belly and the neck, the horse let out a long rattle.  
The mount and its rider obstructing its vision, the ceratopsian brutally raised its head upwards and sideways in order to get rid of them.  
Both were thrown several meters away and at the moment when they were going to land on the dirt, another dinosaur hit them mid-air and they fell on the ground before being trampled.  
Jenkins comrades barely realized his death that a bellow high up caught their attention.

Looking up, they saw the long neck of a mamenchisaur emerge from the dense foliage of an immense tree. The creepers hanging under the branches might had the thickness of a rope, they didn't slowed down the sauropod at all and broke as easily as dental floss.  
Looking back at ground level, one of the riders saw that the body of the mamenchisaur was going to hit the trunk of the tree.

"Watch out!" He shouted to his comrades.

But they barely had the time to hear him that the saw the tree being uprooted on the long-necked titan's wake and then bend.  
The riders who were in the axis of its fall then made an extra effort to bring back under their control the panic-stricken horses but most were able to move aside in time when the tree fell like a club handled by a giant.  
Only two of the riders were not fast enough and disappeared under the tree, one under the trunk and the other at the level of the crown, right next to the truck.

In its fall, the giant tree had split the mounted guards into two groups: While Lieutenant Glenmore, Selma Forrester and four other riders had the time to move away from the dinosaurs' way, the rest of their comrades had ended up on the other side while the animals were running on the road and passing just next to the truck.

In the latter, the visitors had the impression that they went from the frying pan into the fire and when the mamenchisaur that uprooted the tree trotted a few inches from the truck, they trembled at each of its muffled steps and if no one acted to get them out of there, they were going to die crushed in the truck if another of these animals headed straight to them and came to consider the vehicle as a mere obstacle across its path.  
The guards that ended up on their side finally decided to leave the area, riding among the herd along the road.

"They are abandoning us! They are abandoning us!" Someone shouted.

Several burst into tears but, paradoxically, it was one of the stampeding dinosaurs that allowed them to leave. By hitting the truck, a _Triceratops_ lifted it up and the rear wheels passed over the root that prevented them to move.  
Realizing that they were no longer stuck, one of the passengers of the first row, a small and skinny man with a moustache, gathered his courage and rushed to the cabin in order to sit in the driver's seat. The keys being still on the ignition, he turned them to start the engine, engaged the first gear and turned the wheel to the right.  
When the truck reached the middle part of the road, a tree, just as big as the one that had fallen earlier and also uprooted by a mamenchisaur, fell in front of them and the driver braked. The truck stopped in front of the obstacle and was jostled by the last dinosaurs of the herd whose grumble began to fade.  
Hearing a succession of frightened calls, the passengers knew what started the stampede.

Harassing a lagging _Parasaurolophus_ with bloody marks of bites on its sides, came seven medium-sized predators: the metriacanthosaurs.  
The predators saw the screaming visitors in the truck and briefly hesitated between continuing the pursuit of a three-ton hadrosaur capable of inflicting potentially lethal kicks, or serve themselves in a wheeled buffet of more than thirty apparently defenceless humans.  
They took the easy option and let the _Parasaurolophus_ flee.  
It was at that moment that one of the guards who had disappeared under the fallen tree emerged from the foliage, groggy.

The adult male metriacanthosaur, Boomer, spotted him and since he didn't have the time to join his comrade on the other side of the fallen tree, he sprinted towards the only way-out he could reach before being caught up by the predators: the backtracking truck.  
He passed just in front of the wounded duckbill and jumped on one of the doors in the moment before the vehicle drove off.  
While his right hand was hanging on the bars, the guard used his left one to draw his pistol in order to shot at his pursuer.

The first bullets hit the ground at the feet of the still charging predator but when one hit his thigh, he growled in pain and stepped back.  
Seeing that one of his offspring wanted to rush towards the guard, Boomer snapped his jaws at him in order to dissuade him to do so and being shot.  
The humans were not going to be as easy to hunt as planned, and to be successful, the metriacanthosaurs would have to, despite their little experience in hunting live prey, act together in an effective and coordinated way, not just as a pack but as a family too.  
After this brief stop, Boomer resumed the hunt, followed by his pack, running this time towards the left side of the truck, where the human with the pistol could not shoot at them.

X

"Selma!" Glenmore shouted when he saw that she intended to ride after the metriacanthosaurs. "Over there! We will catch them on the plateau!" He said, pointing a gap in the vegetation, created by the mamenchisaurs that had taken a different way than the other herbivores. "This road goes along the cliffs! It would be suicide to take it in the current circumstances," he added a little further.

Glenmore's group had left the road and were galloping through dense vegetation, cutting through the jungle and following the sauropod's wake in order to join the plateau.

They caught up the two mamenchisaurs in a less dense area of forest consisting mostly in palm trees.  
Although the sauropods seemed to have calmed down compared to earlier, they had not slowed down and were trotting at a speed close to the one of a man running at a medium pace, stomping the bushes and laying the trees on their way.

"Don't go between them! Go around!" Glenmore ordered to two of the riders, who had ridden faster than the rest of the group and who were going to end up between the mamenchisaurs if they didn't turn.

But they did not hear him over the sounds of the long-necks and trampled vegetation and as where in sight of the sunny edge of the jungle, a bellow similar to those produced by crocodilians reached Glenmore's ears and by glancing over his shoulder, he saw a large white animal moving further behind them, mostly concealed by the vegetation.  
The Indominus was following on their heels and when it heard the bellow too, one of the mamenchisaurs panicked and moved to the right, bumping into the other one while the two riders were still between them.

One of them managed to get out of this lethal situation by turning to the left, passing under the belly of the mamenchisaur and barely avoiding its legs just before the right long-neck violently bumped into the left one. In the process, one of its legs collided with the other rider and his horse which fell on his side.  
Stuck under his mount, the guard only had the time to let out a short scream before a column-sized hind leg stomped on him.

When they got around the sauropods by the right, the other mounted guards had to jump over a fallen palm tree before emerging from the jungle and leaving its racket for the open air and the relative silence of the meadows.  
They were joined by the one who had disappeared behind the mamenchisaurs and the five of them slightly turned off to the right while the two long-necks continued in a straight line.

Glenmore turned to realize that the I. rex had just stopped at the edge and stayed behind the trees.  
Despite the distance, he saw that she seemed to look up but Glenmore did not know if she would not go forward because she didn't like the sunlight, as it was observed many times at the Coliseum, or because she was wary of the hot-air balloon flying over the meadows, an unknown entity to her that she must have seen as some kind of flying monster.

While they were reading towards the plateau's edge to the west, beyond the trees above which rose a cloud of dust, left in the wake of the stampeding herd, Glenmore turned again and saw that the Indominus had disappeared in the shadow of the Reserve's jungle where hours, if not entire days could pass before they find her.

X

As Glenmore's group was cutting through the jungle alongside the mamenchisaurs, the metriacanthosaurs had reduced the distance between them and the truck up to a few meters whereas the truck had almost caught up with the dust cloud around the herd and which rapidly prevented the driver to have a clear view.  
The sounds of the herd were as deafening as the roar of jet engines on an airport runway, and the herbivores were charging at a surprising speed and letting out bellows or frightened calls while the mounted guards were caught in their stampede, with no visible way out as the terrain on each side of the road was too steep and the vegetation too dense.

Having seen the predators attempt to go on the left side of the truck, the guard hanging on the door had climbed it in order to reach the roof and crawl on it, the right hand hanging to one of the roof bars and the other still holding the pistol firmly.  
However, taking advantage of the fact that the guard was no longer aiming at them, one of the subadult males metriacanthosaurs went to the right side of the truck and jumped sideways to the gap left by one of the teared-off doors. He grabbed one of the passengers of this row and then leaved, taking his prey with him in the thickets in order to eat it peacefully, away from the stampede.  
The guard then crawled to the other side of the truck to grab the other bar but it was then that one of the adult females jumped at the back of the vehicle with such an unrealistic agility for an animal almost weighing as much as a little car that it was frightening.

When her claws sank into the ninth bench and her jaws closed on one of the passengers, the truck stood obliquely on its rear wheels and the guard crawling on the roof passed over the bar and ended up being suspended by one hand above the road and brushed past by several multi-ton dinosaurs.  
The truck's sudden rise, the herbivores panic aggravated as they thought they were attacked by the vehicle itself whose engine roared like an angry animal.  
One of the mounted guard ended between two of the _Parasaurolophus_ and in their panic, the duck-bills squashed him and his horse while further away, another rider and his mount were jostled by a _Gallimimus_ and he fell before being trampled.

Once the truck was back on its four wheels, the female metriacanthosaur let herself fall from the truck and she also disappeared behind the vegetation with her prey and when the driver heard a cracking sound under the wheels, he knew that they had just drive over the body of the guard inadvertently thrown from his mount by the _Gallimimus_.  
While the vehicle was making its way through the herd, Philippa, the subadult female metriacanthosaur, wanted to copy the example of her brother by going to the right of the truck as well and saw the guard who, still hanging with one hand, was trying to climb up.  
Since he didn't want to wait that the metriacanthosaur reach him, the guard threw his pistol inside the truck in order to free his other hand and then he rushed upwards, grabbed the roof bar with both hands, passed a leg over it and then the other one just before Philippa's jaws close on it.  
She growled and moved further to the right before charging and then jump on the truck, throwing the upper half of her body across the roof bar. The vehicle suddenly moved to the left, hitting a rider and his horse as the first was shooting at the metriacanthosaur that was chasing them.  
The guard crawled backwards towards the front of the truck while the metriacanthosaur, teeth and claws sank in the roof, climbed on it by leaning her legs on the bars of two of the doors.  
From the corner of his eye, he saw that the road bended before running along the edge of a cliff for several hundreds of meters.

Because of the narrowness of the road at this level, the dinosaurs did not hesitate to press their gigantic bodies against each other and jostle the truck or the other animals.  
When the passengers saw one of the _Parasaurolophus_ being pushed by a _Triceratops_ and then fall from the cliff's edge while letting out a plaintive cry, they could not help but to be stricken by the scene.

On the roof of the vehicle, the guard had reached the top of the cabin and being cornered by Phillippa, who was cautiously advancing, lying down at each hit from an animal of the herd, he got up and drew his sabre, pointing the blade towards the metriacanthosaur which responded with a snarl.  
Like two duellists, they stared at each other for a few moments while the dust was flying around them, the bellows filled the air and the truck pitching beneath their feet in the manner of a ship's deck during a storm.  
Behind him, the guard heard rocks fall from the edge, a sound that was followed by a neigh which almost immediately faded: The last of his comrades still alive had just fallen, probably pushed by one of the herbivores.  
Seeing his prey and adversary being distracted for a second, Philippa moved forward and opened her jaws to bite him but when she felt the blade of the sabre slash her snout, she stepped back and a hit from a _Parasaurolophus_ on the left forced her to flatten herself.

The vehicle came dangerously close to the edge and from time to time, the right wheels rolled over the void as the truck threatened to fall off the cliff. Inside, the visitors were desperately holding on everything they could and screaming, but some of the passengers of the rows now without doors slipped and fell to their deaths.  
In the cabin, the driver abruptly turned the wheel to the left and the truck pushed one of the animals. It was cruel but he had no choice since in this situation, every being was only concerned by its own survival and not of those of the other animals.

Above their heads, the passengers heard the metriacanthosaur claw the roof when she got up before rushing towards the top of the cabin. The guard screamed but as they thought he was gone, Philippa fell from the roof and in the time of a blink of an eye, those sitting in the first rows saw a gash on her neck.  
Philippa landed on the dust but she wasn't dead yet. She rose her head and let out a furious roar before being suddenly silenced by a _Triceratops_ that crushed her skull when it passed over her body.

The guard was standing on the roof, blooding dripping from his blade, and he watched his dinosaurian adversary being trampled.  
But he barely had the time to realize his victory that he fell in his turn from the vehicle and landed right in front of the same _Triceratops_ that killed Philippa a few seconds earlier. The passengers didn't witness his fate but they guessed it, trampled among the dust.

The road turned and they finally left the cliff's edge behind them. They returned under the shade of trees for a few moments but when they came out again, it was in the middle of a group of corythosaurs that panicked at the sight of metriacanthosaurs and trampled a passenger that had fallen from the truck.  
The herd obstructing his sight, the driver did not immediately notice the stegosaurus that was moving nonchalantly further ahead.

It was an exceptionally large specimen, about twelve meters long, with the tip of the dorsal plates culminating at nearly five meters in height while stegosaurs specimens had usually a length equal or inferior to nine meters. Thus, it was even bigger than the truck and as whether its size was due to age or genetic modifications, the passengers didn't knew and care since they were going to hit it if they didn't turn.

Despite the approaching herd, the big animal did not seem to want to move aside and when the passengers saw his thagomizer (*) swinging dangerously in their direction, they realized that it was aware of their presence and telling them to not come closer.  
The fleeing dinosaurs also saw this signal and the herd split in two at the level of the stegosaur, like water around a large rock, and instinctively, the metriacanthosaurs carefully avoided to pass close to the plated herbivore.  
The truck also followed suit but it turned too late for the stegosaur and when it was within reach of its tail, it struck the vehicle with it in a powerful blow and one of the spikes passed between the bars and went through an elderly man, letting him bleed to death when it retracted.

The metriacanthosaurs had witnessed this and it turned them crazy but as they were swooping on the truck, a duckbill call different from the ones of the _Parasaurolophus_ and the corythosaurs resounded.  
When they recognized the sound of the guards' horn, the distraught passengers turned towards the other side of the meadow.  
Behind the moving bodies of herbivores, they saw five riders galloping to rescue them.

X

Lieutenant Glenmore and those who rode with him rushed to catch up with the truck and help the passengers but the latter were still trapped among a dozen of multi-ton dinosaurs, not to mention the four metriacanthosaurs, Boomer, one of the adult females and two subadult males, still running after the truck with the same relentlessness of a pack of hounds chasing a deer.  
The Scotsman scanned the herd, looking for his other subordinates but he found none.  
Fearing what happened to them when they took the road along the cliffs and seeing the number of dinosaurs between him and the truck, Glenmore doubted and what was left of his men looked at him, waiting for his orders.

"Let's disperse them!" He ended up ordering. "These people must get out of there!"

The riders raised their rifles and shoot several times in the air.  
Frightened, the herbivores scattered in all directions in a large cloud of dust but when they looked beyond it, the guards saw that the truck was still pursued by the metriacanthosaurs.

"Locatelli, send them a message!" Glenmore commanded over his shoulder to the Italian guard which was riding next to Selma.

Locatelli blew the horn but when he put it back over his shoulder, he noticed that Glenmore and the two riders next to the Scotsman, Singh, an Indian, and Martel, a Frenchwoman, had accelerated and left a dozen of meters between them and him and Forrester.  
As the latter two were going to spur their horse in order to catch up, a long column of _Gallimimus_ and dryosaurs, scared by the racket made by the stampeding larger herbivores and the gunshots, appeared from their right and passed between the two groups of riders, forcing the horses of Selma and Locatelli to stop abruptly.  
By the time these bipedal herbivores pass, Selma saw their three comrades distance them until they were out of earshot, riding towards the cloud of dust from which the metriacanthosaurs emerged.

The theropods charging them and thinking that Forrester and Locatelli were just behind, Glenmore took a gun from his saddle and Singh and Martel lowered their electric spears, looking like lancers of old about to charge the enemy ranks.  
To encourage each other, the three began to scream and like if they were responding to the mounted guards, the metriacanthosaurs growled and hissed, and Boomer even let out a roar.  
With one hand firmly holding the spear and the other wrapped around the reins of their horses, Singh and Martel felt them biting their bits under the stress while less than a hundred meters ahead, in front of the dust cloud that a light southern wind was pushing in their direction, the carnosaurs had spread their arms and were keeping their mouths ajar, showing their rows of sharp teeth.

When he was in range, Glenmore fired at the adult female, but realizing that he was the only one shooting while Forrester and Locatelli were supposed to shoot as well, he looked back saw that they had been cut off from them.  
He barely had time to let out a swear that the metriacanthosaurs fell on him and his two companions, just before the dust cloud engulfed them and hide the battle in the eyes of their two helpless comrades.

Said battle was as brief as it was bloody.  
Although Singh and Martel managed to momentarily hold the metriacanthosaurs at bay with their spears, they were quickly overwhelmed by their assaults.  
Singh was snatched from his mount and taken away by Boomer while the two subadults males threw themselves on Martel's horse.  
When the Frenchwoman speared one of the carnivores, he jumped aside because of the electric shock but the other immediately came to bite the horse at the throat, lift it and sink his claws in the base of the neck or in the shoulders.  
Martel fell back from her mount and while she was getting up, the predator flatten the horse on the ground, his maw clenched around the throat, and stained the grass around with blood.  
Without losing a moment, she unsheathed her pistol but as she was about to fire, the other subadult appeared on her left and closed his jaws on her.

Meanwhile, Glenmore had drawn his sabre and was fighting Sheala, the adult female.  
The dinosaur was harassing his horse and every time she tried to bite it, Glenmore slashed her on the muzzle, raising each time growls of pain and anger from Sheala.  
The latter then changed tactics and instead of continuing to attack the horse, she opened her jaws wide to catch the rider.  
At the last moment, he turned, put the barrel of his gun in the mouth of the metriacanthosaur and pressed the trigger.

Sheala drop dead on the ground, clawing the horse's croup in her fall.  
Passing near the body of his mother, one of the subadults saw the bleeding hole in the back of the head left by the guard's bullet and he turned his gaze to him.

Having seen that Singh and Martel were dead, Glenmore spurred his horse in order to escape but a furious roar came from one side, beyond the screen of dust.  
It was Boomer and Glenmore's eyes widened when he saw him charge his horse head first.

The top of the theropod's head hit the horse's ribcage with such force that both were thrown several meters back and when they landed on the ground, Glenmore felt the body of his steed crush his pelvis and legs and he gasped instead of screaming.  
He heard Boomer let out a short cooing sound, then saw him approach and even if he knew he was doomed, Glenmore intended to take with him at least one of the metris.  
He tried to reach his gun, sheathed at the back of the saddle, by stretching out his arm but when the carnivore was at his level, his fingers had only managed to touch the butt.  
Boomer put his arms on the horse and leaned on it, crushing more the bones of the Scotsman who moaned.  
The dinosaur tilted his head towards Glenmore and opened his mouth, letting a trickle of drool running down the guard's face before closing it and, at the surprise of his prey, to step aside.  
Then, Glenmore's vision suddenly darkened and he felt a sharp pain all around his neck.

Under the watchful eye of his father, Philippe closed his jaws around Glenmore's neck and pulled it, beheading him under the horrified eyes of Selma and Locatelli, who were soon to be in range.  
Philippe greedily swallowed Glenmore's head, and the three metriacanthosaurs turned towards the two riders, preparing themselves to face them, but when they heard the thud of the helicopter that was coming from the north, the same that had shot at them during their escape just fifteen minutes earlier, Boomer growled and he and his two sons disappeared into the dust. When the latter dispersed, it revealed the trampled and blood-stained grass of the battlefield and the mauled corpses of two of the horses and their three comrades.  
Forrester and Locatelli scanned the meadow, but saw only a few herbivorous dinosaurs in the distance that had warily watched the battle.  
However, the truck and its passengers were gone and wheel tracks were leading towards the jungle in the south.

Looking up, Selma saw a Turkey vulture circling in the sky up north, above the location of the ambush, and one of the _Farfadet_ drones was flying over the meadow while the _Pegasus_ was going to land.

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) Name given to the arrangement of spikes on the tails of stegosaurid dinosaurs.


	42. Evacuation

Throughout the stampede, the attention of the technicians had been directed towards the zoomed area of the park map on the main screen, where the cluster of dots corresponding to the herbivores chased by the metriacanthosaurs had moved in a quick and coordinated way, like a whirlwind.  
On the sides of the screen, they had also seen the vital signs of several guards flatline one by one, including those of Lieutenant Glenmore last.

When the animals involved in the stampede scattered, they got the footage of the drone that was quickly dispatched to the scene, showing one of the trucks driving among the herd, like a paper ship carried by a torrent, and bodies falling from the cliffs, straight towards the jagged rocks below, or the battlefield on the plateau's meadow. But despite their content, it wasn't these footage that shocked them the most.  
Flying over the road somewhere between the Limes and the plateau, the drone filmed a white shape moving with stealth under the foliage.  
When the technicians froze the footage and zoomed in, they recognized on the spot the one they had spent the morning tracking.

 _The Indominus had entered into the Reserve. How?  
_  
Despite the fact that men had been sent patrolling along the Limes and guarding its gates, she managed to found a way while no attacks had been reported whereas the fence's sensors indicated that no anomaly had occurred.  
But the Indominus had just attacked in one of their major attractions, against all odds, and they quickly deduced that it had to be she must had provoked the sudden panic of the mamenchisaur, thus triggering the domino effect that had resulted in the stampede.

"Hamada is on his way to assess the casualties," Harriman announced after listening carefully to his ear piece.

By breaking the religious silence that reigned in the room, he took Dearing out of her stupor. She was completely stunned and aghast by the footage they were receiving.  
When the director finally decided to give a glance over her shoulder to see what Masrani's reaction was, she noticed that he had left without saying a word, probably stricken by the events and irritated by the words she spoke earlier. Keeping her head down, she thought for a moment then she raised it and stared at the main screen and the number of visitors in the park that was showed on it.

"Evacuate the Reserve!" She ordered in a shaky voice.

X

" _Ladies and Gentlemen, your attention please. Due to technical difficulties, we regret to inform you of the temporary closure of the attraction_ _Expedition: Lost World_ _as well as the entirety of sector four. If you are in this area, please listen to the instructions of the security officers and go to the nearest monorail station to evacuate the area while our teams solve the situation. For any question or request, do not hesitate to ask our employees. It is with pleasure that they will answer you. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding_ ," Declared the synthetic voice in all of the Safari Village's speakers, including the one next to Gertie's Safari Bar and Restaurant, a low and narrow building with a thatched roof.

When he heard the message, one of the waiters went to the shaded terrace bordering the Reserve and explained the situation to the clients.

Zara Young, settled in a sofa at the opposite end, closed her novel, shoved it in her handbag, put on her sunglasses, and left her half-empty cup of coffee on the small table in front of her.  
She followed the other clients and in less than a minute, the terrace was deserted, leaving alone the therizinosaur that was feeding on the leaves of a nearby tree.  
When Young stepped out of the restaurant, Dearing called her and she picked up.

" _Zara, are Zach and Gray with you?"_ The director asked in a worried tone.

"No. They must be still somewhere in the Reserve. Can you tell me why the village is being evacuated?"

Dearing told her about the escape of the metriacanthosaurs and the stampede but concerning the Indominus, she didn't say the slightest word.

" _When did my nephews started the safari?"  
_  
"A little over an hour and a quarter ago."

" _An hour and a quarter? They were somewhere near the halfway point…_ " Dearing deduced. " _When they will return, could you bring them back to Burroughs?_ "

"Okay. I'll wait for them at the station's exit."

Young hung up and headed to _Expedition: Lost World_ , going against the stream of visitors who were walking up the path towards the village's plaza in order to reach the monorail station.

"Excuse me, madam," one of the J-SEC officers hailed her. "You can't go that way. You must follow the rest of the visitors to the monorail station."

"I'm a colleague," Young replied, showing him her badge.

"Zara Young," read the officer. "Dearing's raven," he whispered softly.

On Isla Nublar, some nicknamed Zara Dearing's raven because of not only the colour of her hairs, but also because it was often her that gave the messages of the park director to whom it may concern, not unlike ravens or crows in the mythologies of some cultures.

"My apologies but all employees except security officers, park keepers, veterinarians and their assistants must also evacuate."

"Claire Dearing personally tasked me to pick up two specific visitors at the exit of _Expedition: Lost World_. You would not like her to learn that Hilary of the J-SEC had prevented her orders to be fulfilled," she said, holding back a grin because of the female name that the officer, a man of an athletic figure who looked quite virile, had on his uniform. "It would be unfortunate if you were to be assigned to night shift at the quarantine paddocks."

At this mention, the officer turned pale. Nightshifts at the quarantine paddocks were indeed an unpleasant, if not frightening experience because of the animals that were contained in those.

He admitted defeat.

"Okay, you can stay but don't wander off."

"Miss, are you working here?" Asked a visitor whose two young children were each gripping to one leg of his shorts. "Can you tell us why the safari is closed and why we have to leave the village? My family and I arrived this morning just in time to celebrate Christmas here and we would have liked…"

Young paid no attention to him.

"Hey! Do you answer when I speak to you?" He shouted at her before grabbing her arm.

She turned and pulled her arm away.

"First of all sir, you're going to lower your voice. Second, I am not allowed to give you the answer. Third, I don't care about your life and fourth, it's not a good way to behave in front of your own children. So don't be a pain in the ass and go at the station like everyone else!" She replied. "Thank you."

Not expecting such a virulent and humiliating response from a park employee, the visitor stood with his mouth open and a stupid look, watching Young wandering off, accompanied by the security officer.


	43. Loudwater

"I think we shook them off. You can slow down now," one of the passengers of the first row suggested to the one driving the truck.

But the driver didn't react. His gaze was still fixed straight ahead while the truck rolled among the vegetation.

"You're driving too fast, sir! We're going to collide with a tree!" The passenger said.

"We missed the road above all," another one added.

Since they had left behind them the meadow where the metriacanthosaurs had abandoned their pursuit to attack the riders instead, they had not found the road that they could follow to return to the station and the village.

They had drove blind for more than one and a half kilometre and while they were continuing straight towards what they thought was the south, a bright gap within the vegetation appeared in the distance.  
When they were close enough to see what was there, one of the visitors exclaimed:

"Chasm right ahead! Turn!"

The driver turned the wheel to the left and they narrowly avoided the edge of the precipice but as he wanted to make a U-turn towards a small clearing that was bordering the avoided precipice, the truck made a turn too wide and almost hit the trees between them and the clearing. When it avoided those, the truck rolled over a thick root and the rear wheels got stuck while the driver was accelerating. Then the engine stopped.

"And here we are again, blocked by a root! Good Lord, if he had been more careful, we'd be back on the road and driving towards civilization," an elderly woman complained.

She was talking about a section of the road located in front of them, at the other end of the clearing and the passengers recognized the place: They had returned to the edge of the Loudwater valley.  
Looking over his shoulder, the driver noticed that of the forty visitors who had boarded the truck at the station, twenty-three were still alive.

"Calm down madam. We're all on the edge but we must stay cool and organise ourselves while waiting for help," said a mixed-race woman in her thirties, speaking with a cockney accent.

She was sitting next to her husband and son in the row in front of the one of the elderly lady.

"It's easy for you to say! Your husband and your son are still alive! Mine bleed to death because of this damned stegosaur before succumbing to a cardiac arrest," she retorted, her eyes full of sadness and anger.

"And the monster that ambushed us took my girlfriend," someone else added before several people stated the loved ones they lost.

"What was that thing by the way?" One of the passengers asked. "It looked like a white tyrannosaur."

"Did you see the arms of that thing? Those of the T. rex are known to be ridiculously short," another reminded him.

"And the length doesn't match at all and this is without mentioning what I saw of its appearance. The largest T. rexes are around thirteen meters long, a little more than the length of this truck. On the other hand, the white dinosaur exceeded it when it stopped next to us. I would say that it was something like fifteen, sixteen meters long?"

"Approximately yes. But the guide book says that the T. rex is the largest land carnivore of the park. That one was not there the last time I checked," a woman added.

"Because they didn't put it in it yet. It was supposed to be next year novelty. The park director announced yesterday its name on Twitter: the _Indominus rex_ ," Chris told them.

"I've never heard of this species of dinosaur."

"As much as I am a fan of these animals and have dozens of books on them, me neither," Chris admitted. "I don't know how it ended up in the Reserve however since its enclosure would be, according to the trailer and the preliminary visuals I saw, supposed to be next to Mount Sibo, several kilometres from where we were attacked."

"That monster escaped and they let it roam the island? Are the people at the head of this park mad?"

"I rather think that they wanted to cover up the incident and not create a general panick. They didn't thought that she could pass a six meters high electric fence crowned with barbed wire," Chris said.

"Anyway, we must find a way to contact rescue. I tried with my cell phone but I have no signal. What about you?"

"The same. I don't have bars anymore."

"If we can't phone, let's use a radio. This vehicle must have one, right?"

"Yes, but our guide, Walter, had it in his hands when he was devoured."

"Shit."

"What are we going to do without any phone signal and with the radio in the belly of the indosomething? Smoke signals? Screaming for help at the top of our lungs and draw the attention of the methri… metriaokan… that thing called Boomer and his little family, so that they can have a self-service buffet?" Snapped the old woman whose husband had been killed by the stegosaur.

There followed a hubbub where everyone wanted to assert his positions and his ideas to get out of there and to which Zach did not participate since he had absolutely no solution to propose and even if he had one, he was certain that no one would listen to him.  
Beside him, Gray was still in shock and tears were running down his cheeks as he sobbed. Following Chris example, who was comforting his remaining two friends, Zach tried to address reassuring words to him, but in vain.

A man in his sixties, tall with a thin face and a brush cut of blond hairs, got up and spoke. Although his English was very good on a grammatical and syntactic level, some of his words were pronounced with a Scandinavian accent.

"Listen everyone. We just had a serious accident and some of us lost loved ones but we must…"

The hubbub still continued.

"Sir, it's not worth it," a man sitting behind interrupted him, French or Belgian judging by his accent. "This kind of motivating talk only works in American movies.  
Look at them! They would be willing to kill each other if they were told that only one of them could be saved," he said while two of the passengers were insulting each other and on the brink of a fistfight.

"Someone must take action," the Scandinavian retorted.

"I agree but you go about it the wrong way," a stocky man in his early twenties sitting nearby told him.

He got up and punched the roof of the vehicle.

"Hey! Shut up people!" He bellowed.

Those who were still debating started and fell silent.

"Since we cannot call help, we must think of getting out of this situation by our own means. The truck is still working and the only thing that prevents us from leaving is this root and unlike the first time, we don't have a _Triceratops_ to help us. These vehicles are off-roader but that doesn't mean that they can't get stuck. They must have a winch and we could pull its cable, coil it around one of the big trees in front of us, and then activate the winch so that the truck is drawn towards the tree, allowing the wheels to go over the root and us to finally leave this place," he exposed to them.

"Let's imagine that there is a winch. Someone will have to go out of the truck to find it, pull the cable and coil it around the tree. If an animal ambushes him from the thickets during the process, he won't have the time to escape it," someone stated.

"I volunteer to take this risk," the stocky young man declared. "Where is the pistol that the guard had almost thrown at our faces?"

"It's at my feet," a woman in the front answered.

"To maximize our chances, someone who knows how to use a weapon will have to come with me to watch my back, preferably a soldier or a police officer if there is one among you. I'm afraid that a weekend hunter will crap his pants at the slightest weird noise and shot me in the ass by accident."

He saw the cockney woman raise her hand.

"What's your job?" He asked her.

"I'm a cop," she replied.

"Perfect. Pass her the pistol. What's your name?"

"Jemma."

"I'm Dom. We go as soon as you are ready."

After a small talk with her husband and son, Jemma got up and started to pass over the bench seats between her and the cabin.  
The pistol was passed to her and she inspected it, checking the cartridge clip, before joining Dom who was standing next to the driver. She saw him tap on his shoulder.

"Well done my friend. We wouldn't have made it out alive without you," he said to him.

Dom opened the door on the passenger side and he and Jemma get out of the truck and looked attentively at the surroundings.  
In this part of the jungle, birds and insects were still singing and in the distance, one could hear some monkeys.

Jemma and Dom went in front of the truck, looked for the winch's hook under the bull bars and found it there.  
Dom grabbed the hook and pulled it towards him, unwinding the cable bit by bit. While he was doing this and heading to a tree with a thick trunk at the edge of the clearing, Jemma scanned the jungle and listened for the slightest suspicious sound.

When a toucan precipitously flew away from the top of a tree deeper in the jungle, Jemma motioned to Dom to stop and wait for a few seconds before proceeding.

They crossed the road and reached the big tree. Dom went around with the cable and hitched the hook to it before tightening the cable around the trunk, making sure it was well taut.  
Once it was done, he turned towards the truck and nodded to the driver.

He restarted the engine, engaged the first gear and stepped on the accelerator but the rear wheels still couldn't entirely pass over the root despite the extension of the winch.  
He then asked to the remaining passengers to get out of the vehicle so that they all can, at the exception of the children and the frailest elders, push the vehicle.

As they did this with all their strength and the engine rumbled, Jemma patted Dom's shoulder to show him something in the shade of the trees on their left.  
When he saw what she had spotted, he turned towards the truck and motioned to the driver and the passengers to stop before pointing the jungle and Jemma put her index finger in front of her mouth, telling the others to be quiet.  
The driver turned off the engine when he saw what had appeared just at the clearing's edge.

"No one make a sound!" Chris whispered to those around him.

Everyone froze and fell silent, staring at the gap in the foliage from which a dinosaur was watching them.

It was a corpulent beast, with a long laterally flattened tail and about the same size as the Indominus but unlike her, its skin was ebony and its mouth was ended by a slightly flattened beak with no teeth, indicating to the visitors that it was an herbivore.  
The animal belonged to a species that the passengers had seen from afar during their crossing of the valley: it was a shantungosaur, and by looking at it closely, they recognized the individual as it was quite famous on the internet.

"Do you think it's ..." Chris's auburn-haired friend started in a low voice.

"Bucephalus? Yes, it's him," he replied.

"Jesus… That thing could kill a T. rex…" Someone murmured.

Bucephalus stepped in the clearing and revealed his white-striped legs and the passengers noticed that shantungosaurs forelegs were not as sturdy as the very muscular hind legs.

When one of those who pushed the bus walked on a twig, the hadrosaur promptly raised his head and looked in the direction of the truck while his nostrils were dilated.  
Noticing that one of the passengers wanted to get back in the truck in order to seek refuge in the case where the hadrosaur would charge them, Chris grabbed him by the arm.

"Don't move! If we stay still, he shouldn't attack us."

They, Dom and Jemma remained motionless until Bucephalus lost interest in them and moved away from the clearing.

As the sounds of his footsteps faded amidst the concert of the jungle, Dom and Jemma breathed out in relief and one of them motioned the driver that they could resume.  
At the back of the truck, the other passengers went back to push, puffing and panting, and while Dom rushed to help them out, Jemma stood a few meters in front of the truck, still on the watch.  
When the rear wheels finally passed over the root blocking them, they let out a victory roar and sighed in relief.

Once the euphoria passed, Jemma noticed that the jungle had suddenly became silent and when she turned to Dom to tell him about this, she saw that he was walking towards the tree to unhook the winch's cable.  
She heard a rustling in the thickets at the edge and warned Dom about this but it was too late.

Within the blink of an eye, a subadult male metriacanthosaur burst out of the thickets, swooped on Dom and flattened him on the ground with one leg before closing his jaws around his head.  
Jemma aimed at the dinosaur but at the same moment, one of the predator's brothers and the remaining adult female appeared on the sides and rushed to her.  
Listening her instinct, Jemma turned around and ran towards the truck while being chased by the female and the second subadult male, the first being busy ripping Dom's abdomen.  
All climbed back on the truck and Jemma jumped into the cabin through the passenger door and closed it just in front of the snouts of the metriacanthosaurs.  
She then wanted to join her family but the passengers were converging towards the front part of the vehicle and she was jostled. Jemma had a hard time finding them in the tangle and she saw the metriacanthosaurs trying to get inside the truck.

At the level of the gaps left by the teared off doors, the subadult was wiggling but he managed to introduce only the front part of his body but in the back of the vehicle, the adult had started to destroy the ninth bench in order to clear herself a way towards the visitors that were screaming to the driver to start the truck.  
He complied and the engines roared but the vehicle was still restrained by the winch's cable coiled around the tree. All that the vehicle could do was sliding sideward, disturbing in the process the metriacanthosaur that was devouring Dom, by touching him with the cable.

Unable to escape and taking advantage of the fact that the predators were within range, Jemma aimed at them and shoot.  
Of the three bullets fired, only one hit the animals by sinking itself into the jaw of the closest subadult, raising a growl from him.  
When Jemma wanted to fire a fourth time, she heard a click. The cartridge clip was empty.  
Jemma swore and backed away as well while the adult metiacanthosaur was on the verge on rushing through the gap she created in the ninth bench.  
By snarling at them, the dinosaur scared even more the passengers who by moving backwards, went to agglutinate in the cabin but in doing so, they crushed the driver against the wheel and in the chaos, he unwillingly pressed the horn.

For several seconds, its sound filled the clearing and the metriacanthosaur leaned over Dom's body jumped in surprise and looked, with his snout red with blood, the truck with an air that one could have described as scared.  
The driver tried to remove his head from the wheel but he couldn't because of the passenger that crushed him against it. By pushing him back, he finally could raise his head and the sound stopped.

Meanwhile, the female metriacanthosaur, seeing that it would be too long to destroy the bench seats one by one, came by the subadult to help him pull the right door of the second row and thus enlarge the gap left by the one of the third row.  
The two bit the bars and abruptly moved backwards, pulling off the door from its hinges and the subadult climbed into the truck.  
One leg resting on the bench and the other on the aisle, he randomly bit and clawed.  
He managed to grab one of the passengers by the arm and pulled him out of the truck but as he was about to twist his neck, the female brutally pushed him and stole his prey.

Watching the scene in horror as he stood in front of his brother, Zach saw the subadult trying to bite one leg while the victim was still moving but when the female snarled at him, the youngest carnivore backed off and carefully walked around before returning towards the truck to take a new prey while a large animal was heading towards the clearing judging by the sound made by the crushed and jostled vegetation in the jungle.

A shantungosaur burst out of the jungle, running on its two hind legs, and it stopped and got back on all fours when it saw the metriacanthosaurs. The passengers recognized Bucephalus and realized that the horn sounds had brought him back to the clearing.  
Some remembered Walter's remarks about horn sounds and male shantungosaurs, that they took them as a provocation.

Fearful, the metriacanthosaur closest to the jungle moved backwards from the shantungosaur and joined the other two near the truck who turned away from the visitors to face the giant duckbill.  
The latter was huffing and scraping the ground with one of its front legs, like an angry bull, while looking at the truck and the three carnivores.  
Despite the fact that he had a rather inexpressive bovine look, those in the cabin saw anger in the eyes of Bucephalus. He bellowed, using the red-streaked blue skin flap he had over the nostrils.

In response, the female metriacanthosaur growled and the two subadults besides her, just in front of the last human they had killed, followed her example.  
But Bucephalus did not let himself be impressed and scraped the ground even more before he inflated the skin flap over his nostrils, using it as a resonator and let out a new bellow, louder than the previous one, and to walk towards the truck, letting the rays of the sun expose the silver dots on his back.  
The adult predator took a few steps back while the trapped visitors did not know what to do and feared a clash between the trio and Bucephalus in which they would be caught.

When the female saw that one of the subadults had moved away from her to go on the left side of the herbivore, she expressed him a disapproving growl but she did not notice right away that the other had bypassed the truck to approach the shantungosaur by its right side.  
Suddenly, the two young metriacanthosaurs became too impetuous and rushed towards Bucephalus and the adult ended up doing the same while she had showed herself cautious until then.

Each of the subadults jumped on one side and immediately started to claw and bite Bucephalus who bellowed in pain.  
Seeing the adult predator running towards his head and neck, the shantungosaur raised them and stood on his hind legs to kick the air with his front ones.  
She avoided a kick and stepped back but at the same moment, Bucephalus got back on all fours and gave her a violent head blow.  
She was thrown with a lot of strength to the truck cabin and what was left of the windshield broke under the impact and the stunned metriacanthosaur slid from the dented and sunken hood.

The shantungosaur managed to get rid of the subadults hanging on his back by making a sudden turn, throwing them on the dust.  
In his manoeuvre, the tail of Bucephalus hit the cabin and when he turned, the hadrosaur ended up just above the female metriacanthosaur that was regaining consciousness gradually.  
Bucephalus put one leg on her neck and another one on her chest, maintaining her on the ground while she was wriggling and moaning.  
Then he stood up and let his legs fall on her body and started this again and again, until she died.

Despite the fact that she had attacked them relentlessly, some of the visitors took pity of the predator and found her death difficult to watch or listen, as she had let out a harrowing shriek all the way through.  
It was only by watching this scene that the survivors realized how much Bucephalus was ruthless, and some even thought he was cruel and sadistic, something they had never imagined from an herbivorous dinosaur.

In most mediums, herbivorous dinosaurs were shown to be as placid as cows, spending their time feeding, lovingly caring for their young, and sometimes becoming victims of some hungry carnivores.  
In children's films, the big-hearted hero that braved all the dangers was almost always an herbivore while the carnivores were relegated to the role of villains and in cases where dinosaurs could speak, the carnivores were then being portrayed as barbarians creatures that only expressed themselves through shrieks and roars.  
But as Bucephalus had just shown them, nature was in no way black and white. There wasn't the nice herbivores on one side and the wicked carnivores on the other, no, just animals following their respective instincts and fighting for their survival, acting sometimes with what humans call ruthlessness.

After having killed the metriacanthosaur, the hadrosaur passed over the cable and then, as he was walking along the truck, he looked at the passengers before, without any warning, giving a violent head blow in the vehicle and then another, pushing it towards the chasm.

"We're moving towards the chasm! We must get out of here!" One of the survivors yelled.

Bucephalus gave another blow.

"He'll kill us, and the other two as well!" Another retorted, pointing at the subadult metiacanthosaurs that were charging back.

"Between a certain death by falling from the cliff and a small chance of survival by sprinting towards the woods, I choose the second," a third one said.

"Me too," a fourth one added.

Although most of the passengers were so frightened that they did not dare to move, some approved this suggestion and got off the truck to head in the direction opposite of the shantungosaur.  
However one of the metriacanthosaurs saw this and instead of helping his brother in bringing down the duckbill, he rushed towards the passengers, smaller preys perhaps but much easier to kill.  
Those who had left the truck turned back and fled in the opposite direction, towards Bucephalus.  
Thinking that he would not notice them since he was busy with the metriacanthosaur hanging on his back, the thought they might pass near him. It was a serious mistake.

While the metriacanthosaur went through what could have be compared to a rodeo, Bucephalus attacked the survivors who passed too close to him.  
With a head blow, he brutally threw against the truck's roof the one he didn't knew was a fan of him, and Chris's auburn-haired friend fell dead on the ground, eyes wide open and her neck and spine broken. Another fleeing passenger had his skull smashed with a front leg kick, and his third victim was thrown away with a powerful tail blow.  
Only one of the fugitives managed to dodge his attacks and disappear into the jungle. He was never seen again.

On the meantime, Zach had taken out his phone to see if he ever had any signal for calling rescue, even if they wouldn't arrive in time. When he saw two bars in the upper right corner of the screen, he dialled his aunt's number right away.

As they were slowly rolling towards the edge of the cliff, she finally answered the phone:

" _Zach! Where are you?_ "

"The chasm!" He shouted in order to be heard over the screams of the other passengers and the sounds of the fight between the two dinosaurs.

At that moment, they heard one of the metriacanthosaurs let out a plaintive roar before something big landed on the roof, scraping it and following the bump that resulted of it, Zach dropped his phone.  
Bucephalus had just grabbed the metriacanthosaur hanging on his back by biting the tip of his tail, crushing a few caudal vertebrae in the process, to threw him on the truck's roof.

" _Which chasm?_ " Dearing asked. " _Zach?! Zach?!_ "

By hearing her, he knew that his aunt was panicking and she could probably hear the bellows of the shantungosaur and the growls of the metriacanthosaurs.  
As he had seen his cell phone in the middle of the aisle in which he was standing and leaned over to pick it up, he fell on his knees when the shantungosaur gave a head blow on the hood and pushed the truck a few meters back.  
Then the giant duckbill put his head against the bull bars and pushed the vehicle straight towards the chasm, grunting in the process.

The metriacanthosaur fell from the roof and ended up on the truck's trajectory. He tried to get up but still stunned, he let himself fall on the back of the truck, just where the tenth bench had previously been, but when he felt his hind legs lose contact with the ground, the subadult predator began to squeak out of panic.  
The visitors heard the rear wheels pass over the edge of the cliff and knew that the rear of the vehicle was now above the emptiness.  
The carnivore sank his claws inside the truck but was still losing his grip and it was only by biting firmly that he prevented himself from fall. But by doing so, he was a weight that pulled the truck downer.

When the front of the vehicle rose, Bucephalus redoubled his efforts to make them fall and he let out a bellow that was so deafening that it scared the birds perched in the nearby trees and those flew away.  
The passengers had the impression that their eardrums were going to explode while the metriacanthosaur which had seen his brother disappear behind the truck and was watching the scene at a good distance shook his head, bothered by the sound.

"Hang on to something!" Chris shouted once the bellow had faded.

As the truck was tumbling backwards, Zach managed to catch his phone and the survivors hang on to the remaining bars.  
His back leaning against a door, his feet standing on the back of one of the bench seats and one hand hanging on to a bar while the other was holding the phone, Zach tried to inform his aunt about their location:

"We are above of a river south of a plateau!" He said, looking at the roaring Loudwater below, beyond the gesticulating metriacanthosaur. "He pushed us over the cliff!" He added while looking at Gray who was hanging on the opposite door.

" _What pushed you over?_ " Her aunt asked insistently while the truck, still restrained by the tight cable of the winch, went to hang parallel to the rock wall.

Leaning over the edge, Bucephalus looked at the hanging truck and metriacanthosaur.  
He grunted, then raised his head and turned away from them, leaving the scene with his head held high and straight, walking imperiously like a victorious lord after a battle.  
The last remaining metriacanthosaur stared at him with fear, and immediately retreated in the jungle, abandoning his brother.

If the latter continued to gesticulate, he would pull the truck further down and the stress on the cable would be so high that it would break.  
Some of the passengers then took the initiative to make him fall by throwing all kinds of items to his head but when he wanted to throw a shoe, one of the survivors lost his balance and fell.  
To the astonishment of all, he managed to cling to one of the legs of the dinosaur, which wasn't to his taste and shook it roundly.  
The passenger lost his grip and broke his back against one of the branches of the tree underneath that was growing on the riverbank.  
The metriacanthosaur fell in his turn but unlike the passenger who had clung on to him, he first fell on the tree's crown and then in the river.  
The passengers watched his unconscious body being carried by the current but suddenly, the truck fell. The cable had broken.

When the truck landed on the crown between several large branches, the survivors were whipped by the foliage as they were falling back in the seats after being badly shaken.  
For a few moments, they not dared to move, aware of the precarious balance in which the vehicle was, then, seeing that nothing was happening, they slightly relaxed but when someone got up in the back, the vehicle tilted slightly because of the counterweight effect, the front wheels passed over a branch and the truck sharply moved backwards and fell from the tree, right in the river and taking with it a certain number of branches and leaves.

While the wheels were scraping the rocky bottom, the vehicle was on the verge of being carried by the current and water penetrated in the aisles through the space between the door's bars and the various interstices or gaps.  
Very quickly, the passengers ended up with water at waist-level and the truck started to float before being carried in the middle of the foam.  
The cabin facing upstream, they saw between the splashes the cliff from which they had fallen and the tree that had hold them move away while the current was getting stronger and a roar louder.

Near a meander, they passed by the body of the metriacanthosaur, washed up against a rock on the southern bank.

"Oh, shit! Shit! Shit!" Someone shouted after he turned.

Behind them, the steep-sided valley suddenly widened at the level of a narrow waterfall flanked by two large rocks.

As they thought that the current was going to throw them from the top of the waterfall, the truck spun according to the current and ended up perpendicular to it. The passengers heard the wheels scrape again at the bottom and the truck lost enough speed to not approach too fast from the waterfall, which width was actually inferior to the truck's length as some noticed when they were closer. Thus, the large rocks at each side ended up blocking them but while they were stopped, the truck started to act like a dam and on the upstream side, water level rose slowly.  
Seeking a way out, the passengers looked all around them.

The cabin had ended up facing the southern bank with the doors on the right side opening on the top of the waterfall.  
At this level, there was only a band of flat and slippery rocks so narrow that only two men could have walked abreast if the conditions were less hazardous.  
If they chose this path to reach one of the two banks, the passengers would have taken the risk of slipping and fall on the rocks at the foot of the waterfall in a basin, about twenty-five meters below.  
On each side of the vehicle, the rocks that were holding them were too steep and smooth for them to attempt to climb up to their tops and from there, reach one of the banks.

As he looked at the gap left by the windshield, the driver had an idea and shared it with the others:

"And what if someone tall climb the seat and haul him or herself on the roof before helping the others to reach it…"

"It could work," Jemma assured.

"We don't have the time to find another plan. The water level is rising very quickly," Chris added, worryingly glancing at the wash on the left side of the truck.

The driver asked the Scandinavian to go on the roof and he wasted no time.  
He climbed on the driver's seat, put one foot and then the other on the top of the latter and grabbed the roof bar before hauling himself on the roof and help the next one to climb.  
The survivors gathered at the level of the cabin and one by one they climbed into the driver's seat and grabbed one of the hands they were being handed to be hauled. Once on the roof, they were told to go to the northern bank where they planned to gather before deciding what to do but for that, they had to crawl on the roof up to the rock and then use it to climb down to the bank.

A bit more than two thirds of the survivors had climbed onto the roof when Jemma, whose husband was passing their son to Chris by hauling him by the armpits, saw a green mass appear behind the meander in the distance.  
It was the crown of a tree, the one on which the truck had landed and evidently, their fall had enough damaged it that its trunk broke in two after they left.

Chris, who was helping the Scandinavian hauling up the others, had noticed this too and he urged the other passengers to climb faster.  
However, when he glanced at the tree's crown, something else disturbed him: The body of the metriacanthosaur was no longer where it was upstream, on the southern bank.

"Did you see him Sven?" He asked to the Scandinavian, worried.

"He's no longer there? I would have sworn that he was there two seconds ago."

Between the spot where the metriacanthosaur was washed up and the rock that held the truck on the side of the southern bank, there was several other rocks big enough to hide a predator six meters long and one meter eighty tall. He and his fellow pack members having shown stealth in their approach earlier, there was the risk that the survivors wouldn't be able to hear him come because of the waterfall's roar.

Even when the truck had fallen into the river and raised a big splash of water, Zach had held his phone far from the water in order to maintain the connection with Claire and that one might be able to trace his call.  
However his aunt's voice was no longer audible and there was now only statics interspersed with pieces of words pronounced in a broken way, in the manner of a robot's voice.  
The young man deduced that his phone must have been damaged, but he thought that maybe Claire could hear him more clearly than he heard her and he was describing her the situation, in the hope that the rescue she had sent would act efficiently.

When Jemma climbed on the driver's seat, he took Gray to the cabin as his turn was coming soon.  
Jemma hauled herself on the roof and followed her husband and the others in front of them who were moving on all fours in order to be fast enough while avoiding the risk of falling.  
On the northern bank, the first survivors were walking in a single file towards a spot where the bank was wide enough to allow their gathering.  
Suddenly, one of them pointed to something near the cabin, to the rock on the southern bank, and shouted.

Jemma turned around and saw the metriacanthosaur standing on top of the rock, ready to jump.  
Gray started when he heard the growl coming from the rock and retreated deeper in the vehicle, followed by the survivors who were still there.  
The dinosaur jumped on the roof as Jemma and her family as well as Chris rushed to the rock on the northern bank.  
To find balance, the predator crouched for a few seconds but when he got up, Sven kicked him in the jaws and surprised, the metriacanthosaur stepped back and fell into the cabin while Sven joined the others.

The water had risen high enough to get into the truck in jets, splashing the few passengers on board who could hear the rocks scraping the coachwork as more water passed between the bars of the doors.  
At the level of the cabin level, the metriacanthosaur was blocking their way while at the back, it was the rock.  
There was a small space between it and the coachwork through which they could sneak but once in the water, they would be immediately stuck under the truck by the current, condemning them to be crushed when the drifting tree crown would hit them hard and push the truck over the top of the waterfall.

The metriacanthosaur got up, growling, and walked towards the passengers gathered at the back of the truck, passing over the benches on his way.  
Zach stepped between the dinosaur and Gray and then glanced at the gaps left by the teared-off doors, seeking to eventually escape through them, but beyond them, there was almost the emptiness, not to mention the slippery edge from which they would fall for sure.  
They were trapped and the tree heading towards them, like a battering ram on the verge of breaking through a gate, was going to seal their fate in a few seconds.

X

When she had taken her nephew's call, Dearing had isolated herself in the toilets that were located just a few steps from the control room, afraid of being emotional in front of the technicians.  
She was sitting inside one of the booths, on the throne, and like she had predicted, her throat tightened while listening the roar of the river, the noises of the metriacanthosaur and the screams of the passengers that she heard in the form of bits and pieces interspersed with statics.

"… _tree! It's ... right ... us. ..ick, get out !_ " She heard someone yell over the roar of the river.

" _Zach!_ " The younger of her nephews shouted, completely panicked.

" _Han.. n, Gray !_ " His brother told him.

Then, their voices faded amidst the bubbling of the river, and the sound of the water became the only one heard. It also faded in this turn and solely statics sounded.  
Dearing hung up her phone and put it back in her pocket while her hands were shaking. She tried to get up but her legs trembled and she had to lean against the partition to not collapse. Suddenly feeling a huge weight fall on her shoulders, she slid down until she sat on the cold floor, the legs folded against her chest, and her watery eyes looked up to the ceiling.

Within a single morning, her life had dramatically changed. The one that was going to propel her career, the Indominus, had turned against her by escaping and the organisation of her track had raised tensions between her and Masrani.  
Her relations with the Indian tycoon had considerably deteriorated and when she had insulted Hammond's memory in the control room, she knew that she had reached a point of no return.  
After this, she would hardly be surprised if Masrani suggested her dismissal to InGen's board of directors, which would undoubtedly hold her responsible for the material damage, the losses of several biological assets of the company, and the two dozen of human deaths they had already counted, not to mention the missing truck in the Reserve's jungle, the same one on which her nephews were.  
The last sounds she had heard of Zach's call had been the final blow.  
Her nephews must be drowning in the Loudwater or worse, torn to pieces by a metriacanthosaurs, or both at once. They were supposed to be under her responsibility. What was she going to say to their mother?

She cracked.

"Fuck!" She swore while giving several kicks to the opposite partition.

Then she burst into tears.


	44. Dearing's decision

"Are you alright Claire?" Krill's voice asked, breaking the silence in the toilets.

Dearing, still sitting on the floor of the booth, snorted.

"I'm ok thanks. I just needed to be alone for a few moments. I'll be back in two minutes."

"OK. Don't hesitate to tell me if you need something."

She heard the technician leave the toilets and waited a few seconds, the time to dry her tears. She then left the booth and went to one of the basins opposite. She took two sips of water and looked up in the mirror.  
She noticed that her face was red and that with tears, some of her eyeliner had leaked, leaving black trails on her skin.  
Using a tissue, she made them disappear and then reopened the tap. She put her hand under the water in order to rehydrate her face by patting it with her wet hand.  
As she was staring at herself in the mirror, she inhaled and exhaled several times before leaving.

When Dearing returned to the control room, Masrani still had not returned and one of the technicians listened attentively to his ear piece.

"Helicopter inbound, _CR-1017_. ETA five minutes," he announced.

" _CR-1017_? That's the liaison helicopter with our offices in San José," Dearing stated. "Who is coming?"

"No idea. The pilot didn't tell me who the passenger is," the technician replied.

"Whoever it is, you will tell him or her that I am in the field," the director announced.

All the technicians within earshot of Dearing interrupted their activities and turned to look at her with a stunned look.

"In the field? As if it isn't enough that the Reserve is not usually a place where you can have a walk in the park, you are crazy for wanting to go there now," Cruthers told her.

"I just want to go to the incident site. Seeing it with my own eyes and not through a screen. If our guest asks, tell him or her that I'll be back in an hour."

Without any further delay, she turned around and walked out of the room despite the pleas of the chief technician.

"And now she is abandoning us...," one of his colleagues said.

"You believe in this going to the field story? Maybe she gave us this excuse to go to her house, pack her bags, jump on the first boat, take a flight, change her identity, go to exile in deepest Alaska and breed sled dogs," Harriman said, sceptical.

"I admit that she can be quite a bitch sometimes," Cruthers conceded, "but she is too attached to her job to leave us all in a situation like this one."

"Given what she said earlier to Mr. Masrani, she can show up at the Employment Office at the end of the day," Harriman added, "on the condition that she comes back alive from her little escapade in the Reserve and not in five or six pieces in a garbage bag."

"Her nephews are visiting the park," Krill reminded them, "would they leave them too?"

"It depends on whether she can stand them or not," Harriman answered.

"Can't you just shut up?" Adamson begged them, at her wits ends. "People died and you're gossiping like if nothing bad happened. Have you even a semblance of decency?"

"You'll excuse us Katie but everyone is trying to cope with current events as he or she can and if gossiping like you says can keep us from cracking psychologically and putting ourselves in recovery position under the desk, then we do it," Harriman retorted. "Well that's not all but I'm going to go make some coffee. A lot of coffee because I think that we will need some," he added as he got up.

"Someone should go get some snacks too. Given the amount of job on our hands, we can't go to the AC (*)", Krill said. "Unless we order pizzas?"

The technicians approved this idea and each wrote his order on a sheet they passed to each other.  
While Harriman went to prepare several thermos of coffee in the nearest staff lounge, the technician who had told Dearing about the arrival of the helicopter displayed the CCTV footage of the helipad on the main screen.  
They saw a grey _Agusta A109A_ helicopter with blue stripes and bearing InGen logo landing there. While the blades were still spinning, a paunchy figure wearing a beige polo and black pants opened one of its doors to get off.

"Uh-oh. Cunt alert, it's Hoskins," Cruthers said, recognizing the passenger that stepped out of the helicopter.

"I thought he had already flew home," Krill said. "Why is he coming back now?" "Probably because of everything that happened this morning and judging by his gait, he looks pissed," Cruthers observed, noticing Hoskins face and its rapid pace as he was leaving behind him the helipad and the helicopter taking off.

The technicians heard an electronic beep behind them, produced by someone passing his badge in the slot.  
When they turned, they saw Wu stepping into the room.

"Claire is not here?" He asked.

He was followed by Hoskins who the security guard greeted with a respectful "sir" to which the director of the security division only answered with a nod as he entered in his turn.

"Hello!" He greeted them coldly. "Professor," he added towards Wu, standing next to the door. "Don't pay attention to my anger, it's not directed against you," he told the technicians. "However, I would like to just know one thing: Where is Dearing?"

"That's the question I'm asking myself too," Wu said to him.

"She went to the field," someone answered.

"She'll be back in less than an hour," Cruthers added.

"Claire? In the field?" The geneticist repeated, surprised. "That's a first, since she is the kind to stay in the warm, or rather in the cool given the local climate."

"The reports and observations on staff's behavior that I read about her told the same thing," Hoskins added. "I need to have a serious talk with her! There is a major security problem in our facilities and she does not contact neither Palo Alto, nor our regional headquarters in San José and especially not me? To think that if I had been left in the dark, I would have passed the check-in, taken the flight of this morning to return home in time to celebrate Christmas Eve with my daughter and her boyfriend before having this pleasant family moment ruined by an urgent call informing me that Jurassic World has fallen into anarchy within a single day, all because I would have done nothing to fix Dearing's screw ups. Fortunately, I have eyes and ears within these walls…"

These words casted a chill in the room. Some of the technicians who spoke several times of InGen's board of directors and other higher-ups in not so glowing terms became paranoid and were seen searching quietly their working stations for any mics or looking up at the ceiling, like if they expected to see the barely perceptible diode of a micro camera.  
Cruthers wondered what kind of videos and audios Hoskins had on his computer and which was their eventual usefulness, if it was a measure to counter industrial espionage or to spy InGen's own employees.

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) AC: Administration canteen


	45. Bungalow

Leaving the Administration building behind her, Dearing drove westward, towards the employee village that was nestled between the shores of the Long Lake and the forested slopes of the Southern Plateau, and consisting of about fifty bungalows on stilts with thatched roofs.  
On the village's outskirts, there was a few tennis courts and other sports grounds while in the centre, a bar restaurant stood next to a building that acted both as a grocery store and a gas station.

At its level, there was junction where Dearing turned right to take a road that passed behind the lakeside bungalows and she stopped at its end to park in front of Owen Grady's bungalow.  
She saw that his jeep was parked in front of the shed where he put his bike and his gardening tools and Dearing got out of her car and headed for the entrance door, accessible from the patio that formed an inverted L around the bungalow.

As she was about to go up the steps, she saw a two meter and fifty centimetres long Boa constrictor wrapped around the wooden guardrail, a few meters from the door.  
Although she didn't like snakes and watched the reptile with caution out of the corner of her eye, it wasn't the first time that Dearing saw it since the vicinity of Grady's bungalow was its hunting ground, eating the rats that had the misfortune to go there. Its presence hadn't bothered at all the tenant of the place when he had moved in. Noticing that it was a female, he had even called her Eve and from Dearing's point of view, it was almost if he was treating her as his pet.

Keeping an eye on Eve, she knocked on the door.

 _No answer.  
_  
She called Grady.

 _Still no answer.  
_  
When she grabbed the handle, she realized that the door was open.  
She hesitated a few moments before stepping inside the bungalow.

Contrasting with the modern and orderly feel of her home, the interior of Grady's bungalow was more overloaded and much of the furniture was more rustic and made of wood. On the left, there was a square dining table, separating the kitchen from the living room; on the right, was the living room itself with a couch, a coffee table, a TV stand, bookcases full of books and whose shelves were adorned with animal figurines and under a poster of the film _King Lear_ with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the office stood and while it was also quite overloaded, it had a minimum of organization unlike Cruthers' one.

Dearing looked around but the master of the house didn't seemed to be there.

"Where is this dickhead?" She whispered.

"Who's there?" Asked Grady's suspicious voice, half-muffled by the door behind which he was, the one of the bathroom.

The door opened and he stepped out, wet hairs and drops of water dripping on his body, only covered by a towel wrapped around his waist.

"Oh it's you," he said, realizing that the person who had entered his bungalow was none other than Dearing.

However, the tone of his voice showed that he was not necessarily happy to see her.

"Apologies for the outfit, I just left the shower," he added only out of pure politeness to the one he was very inclined to forget was his superior. "I have a question, however. What are you doing at my place? Isn't there some more urgent matter?"

"You haven't been told of what just happened in the Reserve?"

"Uh no," he answered.

At Dearing's intonation, he knew right away that it was something serious.

"If someone called me, I didn't hear the phone ring since, as I told you, I was showering, trying to get rid of that damn smell of gas. What happened?"

She told him everything of what had happened between the mamenchisaur's panic and the interruption of Zach's call while he drowned in the Loudwater.

"You think they were carried away?" The keeper asked while he was putting spare trousers and an olive green t-shirt.

"Yes, before falling from a waterfall and drowning," Dearing answered in a tight voice.

She had sat in the couch in the meantime and seeing tears running down her cheeks, Grady placed a box of tissues on the coffee table in front of her.

"Thank you," she said.

She took two tissues, one to wipe her eyes and the other to blow her nose.

"I need to go there in order to be sure of what happened to them," she said a few moments later. "I could very well take one of the jeeps as well as a rifle in case and go there alone but the guards won't let me stay in this part of the Reserve. I know you're friends with several of them and that's why I'm asking you to come with me, so they can see someone they trust acting as a chaperone for that frail and stupid thing called Claire Dearing, the pain in the ass park director…"

"Agreed," Grady replied. "Since you told me about all of this, I would have gone there anyway to offer my help to Hamada in tracking down the metris, we can say that you're lucky. On the other hand, I have to tell you a word about your outfit : As much as I can fully understand your haste and that you didn't took the time to go back home and put another top and pair of pants, in which case you will accept taking the risk of deteriorating them, but we cannot overlook your shoes. These sandals are not made for walking in the jungle, even if it's for only about ten minutes, as the terrain is treacherous in many places. I doubt that you would like to slip and break a leg or worse... You've already had enough trouble for today I think."

Grady went to the room that acted as a closet and, sometimes, as a guest room. She heard him searching among his stuff and he returned with an old pair of hiking shoes that he put on the coffee table.

"It's my mother's pair. She forgot them when she came here last summer," he told her while she was strangely looking at the shoes. "She has slightly bigger feet than you but if you tighten the laces well, you should not lose them."

Dearing took off her sandals and put the hiking shoes. As he had told her, she noticed that they were two sizes above what she usually wore.

"You can leave your sandals here," he added as Dearing was finishing her laces.

She left her sandals next to the coffee table and stood up to join the entrance door next to which Grady had grabbed his car keys.

"Here's the jeep's keys."

He threw them at her and she caught them mid-air with one hand.

"Wait for me in it while I take my gear," he said.

Dearing came out of the bungalow and went to sit on the passenger seat of the jeep.

Grady joined her two minutes later, carrying a khaki green backpack in one hand and a rifle in the other.  
He put them behind his seat and then went into the shed and came out with a machete that he put under his seat before sitting in the driver's seat and put the key on the ignition.

The jeep rolled backwards up to the road and then took it, following it in the opposite direction by which Dearing had come.  
They left the village and headed for the bridge above the Rio Iris gorge.


	46. The Safari Village II

It had been more than thirty-five minutes that Young had been waiting in front of the exit of _Expedition: Lost World_ and the truck in which Dearing's nephews were had still not returned. All the other trucks were already there and she had seen the different groups of visitors leave the station with a concerned look, not knowing why their safari had been interrupted and why they had to leave the village. Hilary, the J-SEC officer that had accompanied her to the station, was talking to the station manager to know if all the trucks had returned.

When he came back, she asked him:

"So, what's the situation?"

"I just spoke to the station manager. All the trucks came back except the one involved in the incident. I'm afraid that the visitors you were waiting are among the victims or, if they are still alive, lost in the jungle. It may be better for you to return to Sector One, Zara. If they ever show up in the village, we'll let you know."

Of the "accident", Hilary and Young knew only the broad strokes by listening to the radio messages and had heard of a truck that was caught in a stampede and a bloody confrontation between the mounted grey guards and the metriacanthosaurs.  
Young felt her phone vibrate in her handbag and took it out.

"Dearing?" The officer asked.

"Yes," Young answered before opening the message sent by the director. "She has news of the missing truck: it fell in the Loudwater."

"They must have drown… I am truly sorry."

"I barely knew them," Young said, though the likely death of Zach and Gray saddened her. "You did what you could but thanks for the help, Hilary. Nothing keeps me here. I'm going back to Burroughs."

"Wise decision. This part of the island is no longer safe for civilians. With the Guard helping in the evacuation, it's almost like we're in a time of war," he said, looking towards the two guards who were telling a group of hikers to go the monorail station.

"Take care of yourself."

"You too and good luck, you will need it."

"Thank you."

Young left Hilary and started heading to the monorail station.

On the way, she had to step aside to let a group of a dozen riders pass.

"Make room!" A nearby J-SEC officer said to the pedestrians who stepped aside to let the mounted guards trot in the middle of the path.

X

Among them, were not only Selma Forrester and Locatelli but also those who were patrolling other parts of the Reserve when the Indominus attacked the truck.  
They followed the path to the village's plaza and dismounted there, tying their horses to a fence while some of their comrades helped the J-SEC officers to channel the evacuees, who were also guided by the voice in the speakers.

"Selma!" One of the other guards hailed her. "You should go see Niall, he's at the platform."

Selma passed under the sculpture of the two fighting hadrosaurs and made her way to the station through the visitors. She didn't care about the looks they gave to her breastplate and arms that were stained with the blood of her own comrades when she helped pick up their bodies.

She entered the station and saw that her husband was looking for her in the middle of the mass that occupied the entire platform.  
Once he saw her, he was relieved to see her alive and when they meet in the middle of the crows, he repeatedly kissed her on her lips and forehead.

"Praise the spirits, you're safe and sound… I learned about what happened. How many of ours have fallen?"

"Half of the platoon," Selma answered bitterly. "To say that we got the I. rex. That bitch choose to run away instead of facing us!"

"And Duncan?"

"Philippe slew him. I hope that Katashi and the others will make them pay, he, his brother and his father if they find them," she said, resentful towards the metriacanthosaurs.

The monorail arrived and stopped along the platform. One of the J-SEC officers standing between the visitors and the edge of the platform, the most ranked of those there, stepped forward and repeated in a stentorian voice what he had already said to the previous groups of evacuees:

"Ok, people! This monorail contains three hundred and sixty seats! Families with young children go first!"

The rest of the crowd became nervous.

"Don't worry, you are safe here," he added, "and you will all be evacuated so be patient! Next departure will be in ten minutes. Ten minutes!"

The doors of the monorail slid sidewards and the officers moved aside, letting the visitors enter in the carriages.


	47. The Wreckage

The journey to the Loudwater valley had been quiet.  
While the road skirted the northern side, Grady glanced from time to time the valley, looking out for eventual survivors that would try to join the road by following the course of the river, but the vegetation was way too dense, hiding the bottom of the valley and everything that walked there, not to mention the fact that it was wider upstream.  
However, the more they rolled westward, the narrower the valley became and the trees started to leave room for the rocky banks and the keeper could see the river.

A little further, he noticed that one of the trees on the northern bank had broken in two and that its upper part was nowhere to be seen, probably carried away by the current. Looking back at the road, he saw in front of them the clearing where the truck got stuck.  
Brunet's platoon had parked its vehicles there and Grady noticed that the guards weren't carrying their helmets and their most cumbersome weapons.

When they saw them entering the clearing to park next to one of the marauders, Drekanson came to greet them.

"Madam Director. Owen."

"Hi Leif," Grady replied. "What's the and the metris status?"

"The was last seen north of the plateau and on the seven metris, four died : Philippa trampled on the road along the cliffs, Sheala shot, Priscilla the bones broken by a shantungo judging by the nature of the tracks we found around, most likely Bucephalus, and the truck fell on Kenny."

Grady took his rifle and scanned the clearing. He saw Priscilla's body in its middle and while he walked towards the dead predator, Dearing asked Drekanson where the truck was since they hadn't seen it below.  
He told her that it passed over the waterfall and that those who were still trapped inside were either killed during the impact or drowned.  
Without asking for more, she began to cross the clearing. On her way towards the edge, she passed next to Grady, kneeled beside the metriacanthosaur. He asked her where she was going but she didn't answer and disappeared in the thickets. He had heard the conversation she had with Drekanson and knew she was heading to the waterfall which roar was perceptible at the edge of the clearing.  
When the noise was so loud that it became almost deafening, Dearing began to trot and stopped only at the edge of the cliff.

Half-immersed in the middle of the basin that received the waters of the waterfall, the truck had crashed on the rocks and ended up upside down. The roof had been deformed on the impact and like Drekanson had said to her, anyone still inside had been trapped.  
On the edge of the basin as well as near the top of the waterfall, she saw other guards investigating the scene. One of them hailed one of his comrades to point him the ground while a drone was hovering beside them.

"... they walked along the bank," she heard in their conversation.

Dearing was seized by a thin feel of hope.  
Some of the passengers had managed to get out of the truck before it fell and perhaps that her nephews were among them.

When she and Grady arrived on the bank, Dearing went to talk to Hamada.

"Claire. I have been informed that you will come." He said.

His men turned to the park director and some gave her hostile looks.

"Captain. I would like to know if you found the bodies of an eighteen-year-old young man and a twelve-year-old boy among the victims?" She asked him.

Hamada understood that they were relatives of the director.

"They are my nephews," she added.

"Do you have a picture of them?"

Dearing took out her phone and looked for the two pictures that their mother had sent her a few days before their arrival. She showed them to Hamada.

"I didn't see them."

Hamada hailed Brunet to show him the pictures.

"I didn't see them either. At least, they are not among those found," the Frenchman replied. "Your nephews are probably with the group heading upstream according to the tracks found along the bank."

"I would like to believe it but how can I be sure?" Dearing said, being prey to doubt. "And did you checked inside the truck?"

"Yes," Brunet answered sharply. "There are only a couple of retirees and a few other victims, but none of them are of your nephews' age."

Then she saw a guard return from the base of the waterfall, holding a dented and broken _Panasonic lumix_ in her hand that Dearing recognized.

"This camera, where did you find it?" She asked to her.

"At the base of the cliff there," she responded, pointing a rock wall on their side of the basin, a few meters from the waterfall, just below one of the two large rocks that had momentarily held back the truck before it fell.

"What's about it?" Grady asked.

"It's Gray's, the youngest. I saw it among his stuff and there are his initials sewn on the strap: GM," Dearing replied, showing them the letters on the strap.

She walked towards said cliff and noticed that the entanglement of creeps that covered the wall concealed a narrow ledge running under the large rock.  
Dearing imagined a scenario in which her nephew had managed to get out of the truck through one of the torn-off doors, progressing towards the rock by using the bars as holds and then let himself fall and grab a vine before putting a foot on the ledge and follow it.  
From this point, her scenario split into two possible directions that Grady described:

"After he jumped, either he joined the others, or he escaped to the jungle. The first solution seems more plausible."

"What makes you say that the second is not just as plausible?" She asked him.

"If he is smart, he will seek to benefit of the group's safety," Grady explained. "After all, Man is a gregarious animal. At least, that's what some says..."

"I hope for you with all my heart that his brother also survived, Claire," Hamada said. "If they come to one of the crossing points upstream, I will have you informed. Men are being deployed there and from their positions, they won't miss the survivors walking back up the Loudwater towards the road."

They returned to the rest of the guards, gathered on the basin's edge and ready to leave.

"It may be better for you to go back to the Administration," the captain of the guards said, "I think we need you there more than here. We must leave you, the metriacanthosaurs are still on the run."

Grady and Hamada nodded to each other and the latter began to climb back up the slope, following his subordinates.

"I refuse to stay with my ass on a chair, nodding to everything that's being said to me!" Dearing said. "I wish to be part of the searches."

As if to show them that she was ready to follow them, she rolled up the sleeves of her blouse and pants.  
The guards looked at each other and if they had not lost some of their comrades and friends earlier, the director was sure that they would have laughed in her face.  
Hamada, on the verge of losing patience, turned to give her his answer.

"In case you did not understand me, we are going to hunt three metriacanthosaurs, including an adult in his prime. If ever a confrontation takes place, it may become bloody very quickly. I would not like to be rough on the edges but I am afraid that, in addition of being a walking bait with your light-coloured clothes, you will be nothing but a load to us. Go back!" He said authoritatively. "Your safety is at stake."

"What Katashi is trying to tell you," Brunet added, "is that the jungle is not a place for princesses of your kind."

Judging by their looks, all the guards, men and women alike, agreed with what Hamada and Brunet said, although Durant seemed surprised by the harshness shown by her captain, who was usually calm and more tactful.  
Then they turned away from Dearing, who felt ridiculous, and resumed their ascent back to the clearing.

Dearing turned to Grady who was looking at the opposite edge of the basin.  
During the investigation of the site, _Compsognathus_ had gathered on the edge, watching the humans.  
Grady knew why the little green dinosaurs were there. They were not only attracted by the bodies of the passengers inside the truck but also by the metricanthosaur under the roof and whose blood has splashed the rocks. A Turkey vulture had already landed there, passing his head and neck under the truck to come out with pieces of flesh in its beak.

Once the guards disappeared in the vegetation, the _Compsognathus_ chirped in concert and rushed into the water with the same energy as competitive swimmers and swam towards the truck while waving frantically to fight against the current.

"And for the bodies still inside? We should call someone to get them out," Dearing suggested.

"This kind of operation would take time and you think that as long as the will roam freely the Reserve, no one will dare to come here. It's sad to say but from now on, the bodies will be at the mercy of the scavengers."

As the first _Compsognathus_ reached the truck, Dearing and Grady began to climb the slope as well.

"Brunet got a nerve, calling me a princess… This old cheese-eating surrender monkey is a dinosaur in the figurative sense of the word!" The director grumbled, angered by the words of the French ex-mercenary.

"Are you insinuating that Gilbert is a macho? You're wrong about him. He respects his female comrades and treats them as equals. You know who he trust the most within his platoon? Nataliya," Grady retorted. "You know, his words could have been very well said by Patience," he said shortly after, "and knowing her, she would had treated you with less caution than Gilbert, who is yet not known to be a great diplomat. By reacting like this, you remind of those sensitive wimps who militate against patriarchy and are brought under control by female cops."

"Oh no! Don't compare me to Social Justice Warriors!" Dearing retorted in an offended tone. "I hate these people!"

"We have this in common in this case," Grady told her in a low voice.

"You're not kidding?" Dearing exclaimed in an incredulous voice.

"What? You thought that since I was a friend to animals, pro nature protection, against biological patents and so on that I was some sort of caricatural leftist hippie? If so that's a very binary vision that you have since the reality is quite different and trust me, SJW would lynch me if I talked about some of my political and societal views in their presence. Anyway, let's end this digression. You heard Hamada. You may be at the helm of this park but the jungle and its dinosaurs are beyond your control and with the Indominus and three metriacanthosaurs free, you might be more comfortable in the control room."

"I won't go back to Burroughs without my nephews, whatever their condition!" Dearing insisted.

"What do you want to do? Stealthily follow the guards while they are searching? Be reasonable for a second..."

They had reached the top of the slope and, when they stopped there, Grady saw out of the corner of his eye a black object hidden under the fallen leaves.  
As he got closer, he saw that it was a smartphone.

"Owen, what...?"

Dearing also came closer but when she saw the colour and size of the phone, she thought she recognized Zach's phone. The screen was cracked and the device itself was laying in the middle of a tridactyl footprint around thirty centimetres long, the one of one of the two surviving subadult metriacanthosaurs.  
This discovery left her very worried.

"No no no…"

Dearing knelt to grab the phone and by taking it in her hand, she felt it was wet and she tried to turn it on. The screen remained black, which prevented her to be completely sure that it belonged to Zach but the fact that they had found Gray's camera earlier down the cliff and that the smartphone she was holding was identical to the one of Zach strongly implied that.

"There are two sets of human footprints : one of an adult or a quite tall teenager and one of a child between ten and twelve years old judging by the shoe size," Grady observed. "I think it's them."

He pointed to the sneakers footprints of different sizes, overlapping on the loose soil.  
Next to the dinosaur footprint, there were also a rather small handprint, Gray's.

"I could follow them to find out what happened," he resumed. "Let's see if the knowledge I gained during a stay in Africa is not rusty…"

Grady straightened up and began to walk up the track.

"They are going in this direction..." Dearing reminded him, pointing to the opposite direction.

"I know. But we must go back to the waterfall in order to reconstruct the whole scene."

They followed the tracks in the opposite direction, to the edge of a cliff near the waterfall.  
At this level, someone had sank his hands in the ground between two knotted roots that ran down the walls before hauling himself: Dearing's nephews had climbed up there.  
Grady scanned the surroundings and saw that pieces of soil had slid down a slope a few meters away and he saw two long trails, left by a large animal when it went down the slope.  
From this spot, they started to follow the tracks and figure out what happened.

Shortly after hauling themselves over the edge of the cliff, Zach and Gray had momentarily searched for a way up to the clearing, but a metriacanthosaur had appeared and ran down the slope, forcing them to flee.  
At one point, Gray fell and when helped him to get up, Zach lost his cell phone, which was crushed under the carnivore's feet.

"There are other tridactyl tracks here," Dearing said, standing further along the trail.

Grady came to her.  
There were the footprints of the other subadult, who had joined his brother in the hunt. The keeper noticed that the strides of the boys narrowed and deduced that they were getting tired.

Ahead, there was a very shallow river in which the tracks disappeared.  
Grady crossed it to see if there wasn't any tracks on the other side but instead of finding those of the two boys, there were those of the adult metriacanthosaur, oriented towards the river.  
He thought that Zach and Gray, cornered, had suddenly turned downstream, running straight to the top of a waterfall.

Dearing and Grady leaned cautiously over its edge, right next to a rock on which slobber had dried in the sun.

"You think they jumped?" She asked.

"That's what I would have done if I had three metris right on my ass."

The waterfall was flowing into the Loudwater which, after the basin, resumed its westward course. Below, the eddies were numerous and the current strong and fast because of the narrowness of the river at this level, barely wider than fifteen meters. They looked closely at the banks but they didn't see the boys and knew that the current had carried them further downstream.

"The guards think they are with the others upstream," Dearing recalled, "we are the only ones who can help them."

"Let's go back to the jeep first. I have to take my backpack and my machete. I must also brief you a few things."

When they returned to the jeep, they guards vehicles were gone and concluding out of this that the metriacanthosaurs had to be far enough, Grady have his instructions regarding the journey they were about to undertake:

"Well, I don't remember if you've ever been hiking in some wild lands but there are a number of rules to follow: No smoking, no shouting, phones must be switched on silence mode, and stops only when it's necessary. _Capisce_?"

"Understood."

He took out a metal box from his backpack and opened the lid to put two of his fingers inside.  
They came out almost immediately and Dearing saw that there was a white and black stained sticky matter on them, which he spread on his face, neck and clothes. She couldn't help but to give him a strange look.

When he handed her the box so that she can do the same, Dearing instinctively stepped back.

"Come on, don't be a child and put some of this on your skin to hide this smell of perfume… Vanilla, isn't it? I like the smell of vanilla," he said, "and I missed it...", she heard him add in a very low voice.

Reluctantly, Dearing opened the box and looked at the content suspiciously. A pungent smell rose to her nostrils.

"What is that? Some shamanic ointment made with plants and of which only you have the secret?" She asked. "In any case, it have quite a smell and its appearance is not of the most appealing."

Grady waited for her to put some of this substance on her face and neck before revealing its nature.

"Not at all. It's T. rex's droppings."

Dearing grimaced with disgust. She realized that it indeed looked a lot like bird droppings.

"It's an old survival tip of the Grey Guard. The smell keeps other dinosaurs away. Most of them at least…" He told her.

"One can wonder how they realized it worked. Oh well, if it can increase our chances of survival," she shrugged.

To the keeper's surprise, Dearing plunged her fingers in the droppings and spread some on her throat and clothes before passing him back the closed box. He put it back in his bag, wiped his fingers with a tissue and gave one to Dearing so she can do the same.

"It wasn't worth to put such a quantity on you," he told her with a certain degree of amusement. "With all that you smeared, the smell will take days to go, even if you shower. Are you ready?"

"I think so."

"Then let's go."

Grady put his bag on his back, the machete inside a scabbard hanging to his belt, and he took his rifle.

"Uh Claire? Pass me your flask please," he asked after they had walked on only a few meters.

He had noticed that Dearing had still her flask in one of her pants pockets.  
She took it out and handed it to him.  
But when she saw him open it and empty it on the ground, her eyes widened in surprise and anger.

"The whole bottle cost me forty dollars!"

"Listen, I know you're having a bad day, but I don't want to take the risk of you getting drunk, especially where we go; and by emptying the flask and taking it from you, I won't be tempted to drink too," he said while putting the empty flask in his backpack. "All our senses must be alert so we can react as quickly and effectively as possible in case of a danger. _Il faut être aware_ like Van Damme would say. With everything that this jungle contains, stay behind me, ok? _"  
_  
"Ok."

"We shouldn't encounter the metris by going downstream but they are far from being the sole dinosaurs that might be a threat to us. And dinos are not the only kind of the latter… Given what we can find on the forest floor, you're much better in those shoes than in sandals or heels. Venomous snakes, plants that can inject you a toxin if your skin brush past their leaves, hordes of Army ants that have already been seen attacking and eating hatchling dinosaurs… In short, it's a whole world that lives between the legs of the dinosaurs and which also must be taken into consideration so be careful where you put your feet and hands."

"Understood, Allan Quatermain," Dearing retorted sarcastically.

"Allan Quatermain? Well, well, well... My lady seems to know her classics," Grady said, pleasantly surprised. "It's true that the whole _adventurer that takes a city slicker woman in the heart of the bush_ thing is reminiscent of some old adventure novels or movies. I have the impression of being the character portrayed by Michael Douglas in _Romancing the Stone_."

"Which puts in the role of Kathleen Turner's character?"

"Aside some details, something like that, yes. As long as you don't behave like Willie Scott from _The Temple of Doom_ it should be alright. She is the reason why this movie is the one I like the least of the _Indiana Jones_ series. Yes, I prefer _The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull_ over it. Call me a heretic if you want."

They found the tracks and followed them to the spot where they thought Zach and Gray had jumped.

"Thanks by the way, for taking the time to help me. I will pay in kind," Dearing promised him.

Grady raised an eyebrow.

"By offering me a copious dinner in a restaurant? I think we might need to look for one on the mainland since negative as I am, I don't think that this park will be still open by the end of the day."

"I must admit that I have my own doubts on the matter too…," she confessed.

"And don't thank me right away. We don't know yet if they will still be alive when we will find them."

He had spoken too quickly and turning around, he saw that Dearing's saddened look had returned.

"Sorry," he corrected himself, "I lacked tact."

They arrived on the bank of the Loudwater and began to follow its course downstream, where the river entered a narrow gorge in the mountains.

"When I mentioned the possibility of coming here alone with a rifle," Dearing said, "you did not even ask me if I knew how to use one?"

"I've been to your office before, remember? I saw the trophies on the shelves. _1999 Dane County Champion_."

"That's accurate. You are observant."

"A necessary quality for studying animal behavior."


	48. Spectre

Guided by Harriman who had sent them the coordinates of the metriacanthosaurs tracking implants, the guards headed east and when the vegetation became too dense, they stopped their vehicles and get out of them to continue on foot.

As Hamada had told Dearing, they had deployed a part of Brunet's platoon farther upstream, sending a teams of four at each of the three crossing points that led out of the Loudwater valley. Thus, thirteen guards were with Hamada and Brunet, including Velasquez who had returned in the meantime and told them about the last words of the worker. Like Niall Forrester, they didn't understand those.  
Regarding the incursion of the I. rex, some blamed Velasquez, Tian and Turner for letting her enter through the gate they were supposed to guard and for the deaths that occurred thereafter. The three recruits assured them that they would have seen her if it was the case and the CCTV footage of the gate confirmed their version of the facts, withdrawing them any liability.  
At this moment, a few had hypothesised that the Indominus had taken some unknown passage. However, most thought it was unlikely and the mystery about the way she slipped through their net made them very uncomfortable.

Like if he suspected Henry Wu to know a part of the answers to their questions, Brunet had sardonically and loudly said:

"Wu can already prepare coffee and sugars. We shall pay him a little visit once this mess will be settled."

The company was walking in a file, with two guards moving abreast, and at its rear, Durant was walking alongside Drekanson.

"I have never seen captain Hamada speak that way," she whispered, referring to the tense discussion he had with Dearing earlier.

She looked towards the head of the line and saw Hamada constantly looking around and listen nervously. Durant had never seen her captain act like this.

"Usually he is much more impassive and controlled," she added, still in a low voice. "I wouldn't like to claim this but he doesn't look to be himself."

"This no claim," Drekanson finally replied a few seconds later. "Let's say that the death of many of our brothers and sisters and the fact that there is a large theropod roaming freely in this jungle has brought back bad memories, from the time when he was on Sorna."

"Are they related to the dagger? The one whose handle is a tooth?"

"Indeed."

"Without wishing to be indiscreet, can you tell me what is the story behind this dagger, sergeant?"

He turned to her.

"I could. But promise me to keep it for yourself."

"I swear."

Drekanson looked lengthily into her eyes, as if to judge her good faith.

"Only Erin, Gilbert, Patience, Helm and I knew it in detail. It took place when Caer Draig was still in construction and involved a spinosaur. A large male, with one eye emerald green and the other blind, a partially damaged sail and one of his sides covered with burn marks."

"Ammut, the Mad King of Sorna. Lieutenant Laurence had told me about him. Some says that he killed a T. rex once."

"A ferocious and relentless beast, one of the most formidable and feared foes the Guard has ever known. He killed several of ours in the jungle and ended up discovering Caer Draig, which he attacked one night. He almost broke through its gate but luckily, the defenders managed to repel him and he retreated further inland. Since he was disturbing the island's ecosystem, by killing every other large predator he encountered, and posing us a major threat, Marshall Pennant had ordered his death and patrols where sent to found about his whereabouts. Hamada was part of one of them but he and his companions, whose names are engraved on the handle, were attacked by Ammut. He made it out alive only be disappearing in Sorna's wilderness. At the moment, they thought he was dead and Ammut's tracks were lost. The spinosaur wasn't seen or heard until ten days later, in the middle of a stormy night, where one could hear from the watchtowers his roars among the thunder. Hamada came the next day to this same tower and he was so weak that he collapsed on the wet ground before even reaching its base, while firmly holding in his hand one of Ammut's teeth."

Thanks to this revelation, Durant immediately concluded that the mentioned tooth became the handle of the dagger.

"He was seriously injured and on the verge of death. He owes his life to Gilbert," Drekanson continued. "During his convalescence, Ammut's body was found, drifting offshore on a raft of trunks washed away by a flood, rotting under the sun and being eaten by gulls and sharks. Before he sank to the depths, his remains were retrieved and his skull now sits in the great hall of Caer Draig, staring at us with his empty orbits during meals or gatherings while his memory is still strong within the walls of the fort. Whenever we says his name during chats around the fire, it's almost like he's judging us. Now, I think that Hamada sees in the Indominus a shadow of the past, the one of Ammut, even a reincarnation of him. But they are two very dissimilar beasts, both physically and behaviourally: The Mad King was notable for picking a fight whenever he could while the I. rex thinks and knows when to retreat and wait for another opportunity. In her place, Ammut would have attacked Glenmore's party even if it would have been bigger. I hope that Katashi is aware of this…"

Once Drekanson finished telling her about Hamada's past, Durant thanked him with a nod and both fell silent.

Very soon after their discussion, the company was surprised to see a singular creature standing on the top of a rock on the edge of the path they were following.  
The creature in question was Spectre, a female dryosaur which had the specificity of being leucistic and had been chased away by her herd when she was younger.  
Although she was known by both guards and park employees, she was rarely seen and she was last observed several weeks earlier.  
Without her subcutaneous tracking implant that sent her GPS coordinates at regular intervals to the satellite, many would have believed she was dead and for the guards, her sudden appearance had not only an almost magical side but also a troubling one.  
Manifestly, and for unknown reasons, she did not flee when they arrived and stayed on her rock. She turned her gaze towards the guards. It was almost like if she had waited for them.  
Although Spectre was only a dryosaur, an herbivore species that many would have considered unremarkable and harmless at first sight, she had a disturbing aura because of her frail, pale limbs and her dark, piercing eyes that had looked the approaching guards without blinking.

As he passed just in front of Spectre, Hamada stopped to look at her and not purposefully, his gaze met hers. She was overlooking him from the top of her rock and Brunet, who was just behind Hamada, would have sworn that in reaction, her gaze became more intense and she even looked threatening on the moment.

After a few seconds, Hamada looked away and resumed his walk, keeping a low profile and looking dismal.

When it was Brunet's turn to pass in front of the dryosaur and endure her gaze, he just looked at her with a jaded air and said, in French and on a casual tone:

" _Tu veux ma photo?"  
_  
He continued and Spectre watched the guards pass in front of her, one by one, raising various reactions, from a look out of the corner of Rahim's eye to Darbinian's total ignorance and a vain "Come on! Go away, you weirdo!" from Baker.

When Drekanson turned to see if Spectre was still on her rock after the rear of the company left a few meters between it and her, he noticed that she had disappeared. Dryosaurs being light-footed, he wasn't surprised that he didn't hear her go behind some thicket or bushes. He turned towards the company and continue to scan the surroundings with his eyes.

This encounter left Hamada even more troubled. He had his reasons: In Japan, white is a colour associated to death and meeting Spectre in the middle of the jungle the same day of the Indominus escape couldn't be a coincidence from his point of view. Afterwards, he looked like a sentenced to death person living his last day.


	49. Control III

Sitting in a corner by a small table that he had himself brought from the storeroom of the administration building, Hoskins was eating a slice of pizza while watching the busy technicians and Wu nervously pacing when he was not leaning with his back against one of the walls, looking pensive.  
When they had heard Lieutenant Brunet sardonically mentioning paying Wu a visit, Hoskins had seen the geneticist become nervous, like if he dreaded this situation.

"Come on Professor, I understand that the situation doesn't make you comfortable but relax and get something to eat."

"I'm not hungry," Wu retorted.

"Well, it's up to you."

Hoskins looked at his watch. It displayed twelve fifty.

"I'm here since over an hour and Dearing still hasn't returned," he noted.

He took out his phone and dialled the park director.  
Unaware that she was then walking in an area where her phone couldn't get any signal, he only got her answering machine and he tried to call her again.  
He got no answer.

"She doesn't answer? All right, I call the J-SEC. Willingly or by force, she will bring back her ass here!"

Two minutes later, an officer came to report to Hoskins.

"I want you to send someone to Dearing's house as well as the boarding docks and the Marina in case she would like to take off without saying goodbye."

"Yes, sir."

"Check the bars and the cellars!" Wu suggested to him.

In other circumstances, several would have giggled at this remark.

Dearing's fondness for alcohol was not a secret and from time to time, some liked to tell the episode that happened during a gala dinner that was given in the ballroom of the Palace of the Lost Valley and in which Dearing gave a speech while being drunk. Some claimed to have seen her at the end of the evening, throwing up in a bush while her hairs were held back by her assistant.  
But no one was in the mood to laugh and Hoskins looked at the geneticist and shook his head, telling him that it was not the time to try to be witty.


	50. Scavengers

Dearing and Grady were walking on the stony bank of the Loudwater since a good half an hour.  
While he was moving with a relative ease, she had more difficulties since she wasn't used to walk on such a difficult terrain but also because of her shoes. She stumbled several times over a rock and when the relief forced them to walk very close to the river, she struggled to maintain her balance as they walked on the rocks.

They arrived in sight of the end of the valley, where the water of the river, collected in a pool, threw itself from a ninety-one meters tall waterfall before reaching the ocean half a kilometre further.  
In his journal, the conquistador Diego Fernandez had named the place the Crenel on the Distance since the almost vertical walls framed the top of the waterfall like the merlons of a crenel, facing west and overlooking the ocean.  
Above it, offshore, grey clouds were gathering.  
Grady looked at the sky above the waterfall.

Seeing no vulture or other scavenger bird circling, he was almost certain that Dearing's nephews had not fell from the waterfall and the pool before was not deep enough to let human bodies be carried towards it and if Zach and Gray had drown, they would have already found them, either blocked by a rock or washed up on the bank.  
It was by looking closely at the edge in front of them that Grady saw an area where the mud had been recently trampled, next to a large washed up branch and just before a stream that was flowing into the pool.

When they got closer, they saw hand prints and sneakers tracks similar to those seen earlier. Grady and Dearing were relieved to have found the boys tracks. They had crawled on the edge and sat on a trunk a few meters away, to get a grip on themselves and rest a little before leaving.

 _But since they are alive, where did they go?_ Grady wondered because if the boys had walked up along the Loudwater, they would have met them for sure.

Then he remembered hearing from someone's mouth that there was a network of mostly unexplored caves stretching under the mountains and a large part of the island.  
The answer was in front of them, in the form of the stream and indeed, the tracks were skirting it up to the entrance of a cave, located further in a recess.

"Bingo!" Grady said.

"Do you know where it leads?" Dearing asked.

"No idea. I've never been in this corner of the Reserve."

Grady took a flashlight out of his backpack.

"Are you game for some speleology?"

She answered with a shrug and a nod and they walked towards the entrance.

X

"Are you sure it was a good idea to come here? Let's go back and walk along the bank. I'm sure that rescue is at the truck," Gray said.

"And taking the risk to meet those dinos again? We would be trapped between the walls and the river."

They were advancing in the darkness of the cave, illuminated only by the small glow of Zach's lighter. It was half-past twelve and their stomachs were gurgling.

After haling themselves out of the pool, they had rested a little since being carried by the river over more than one kilometre had tired them. They also had taken the advantage of this moment to try to wring their drenched clothes and eat the little amount of food contained in Gray's fanny pack, consisting of some sweets that had softened under the contact of water and a chocolate bar they had shared in two.

The only sounds in the cave were those of the trickling of the water on the rocks and they continued to advance silently until they heard a "crack". Gray jumped back in surprise.  
Zach lowered his lighter towards where the sound came from.  
His brother had just stepped on a skull. A human skull, face down. Zach passed the lighter over the body to which it belonged.

In the light of the flame, they saw that a plate armour covered the bones of a man of medium stature.

"A conquistador...," Gray murmured, recognizing the type of armour. "What is he doing here?"

They also noticed the two arrowheads stuck in the cervical vertebrae.

"Haven't you read about the history of this island before it became a dinosaur zoo? The Spaniards had built a town near the volcano and deported hundreds of natives from the mainland, using them as slaves in the mines. When an eruption destroyed the colony, the slaves broke their chains and fled in the jungle before forming the tribe that lived here up to the mid-eighties."

"You remember all of that?" Gray asked him in a surprised tone.

"What? You think I'm just a jerk who has no interests and only listens music and hit on chicks?"

"No, no ... It's just that you surprise me. Uh Zach ... There is another skeleton." Gray pointed a severed foot attached to a tibia and a fibula, at the edge of the area lit by the lighter.

As they approached, they saw that this second skeleton was neither the one of a conquistador, nor the one of a Tun-Si, and indeed, it didn't date back to the sixteenth century but was much more recent. Zach passed the lighter to his brother and leaned over the skeleton to pick up a modern firearm.

"An automatic rifle ... Definitely not from the sixteenth century," he said.

"I don't understand, his clothes have InGen's logo."

Zach put the rifle down and looked at the logo stitched on the once green fatigues, ragged and covered in dust.

"Isn't it the company that built this park?" He asked. "The one Claire is working for."

"Yes, exactly," Gray replied. "But he doesn't look like the security guards of the park."

"Because he's not one of them but probably a member of the company's private militia. Hired to do the dirty work… Let's search him! There might be some useful stuff in his bag or his pockets."

Zach saw Gray hesitate a little to the idea of searching the skeleton.

"He's been dead and forgotten for years, don't be embarrassed. Empty the bag on the floor. We will sort its content."

His brother complied and emptied the bag with his free hand, revealing its content in the light of the flame of the lighter that began to lose in intensity.

"Zach, the flame is getting dimmer."

"Let's make some torches in this case."

They tore off the legs and arms of the fatigues and while Gray was cutting them into several pieces with a knife that they had found in one of the pockets, Zach separated the femurs from the rest of the skeleton by trampling the neck of the femur and the patella. Then, they firmly wrapped some of the pieces of the fatigues around the tip of each femur and lit them with the little fire still produced by the lighter. With the light of these torches, they could better examine the content of the bag.

There was a plastic box that probably contained food but which they didn't dare to open, fearing of releasing a foul smell of rot in the rarefied air of the cave; a flask; a broken radio; rifle magazines; a machete; a topographic map of the island; and a charm magazine, dating from October 2002, and whose pages were sticky because of the moisture as Gray noticed when he opened it before his brother take it from his hands and threw it away and gave him a look that said "Not for you". Of all of these items, Zach took only the flask, the machete and the map which he put in the backpack that he passed over his shoulder.

Looking up, the boys realized that they were at the base of a wall from which both the InGen's soldier and the conquistador had fallen. To their left, the erosion had carved steps in the rock and the stream cascaded from those. They climbed those steps with great care as they were slippery, reached the top of the wall and passed under the vault that marked the entrance of a tunnel which described laces as it ascended.

Ten minutes later, the light of day appeared after a turn and they abandoned their torches.  
When they stepped out of the cave and climbed the embankment located in front of its entrance, their eyes took a few seconds to get used again to the sun.  
Once at the top of the embankment, they noticed that they had ended up in a steep-sloped narrow vale with a rocky ground and in the middle of which a stream flowed towards the trees of a dense forest at the end of the vale.  
Thirsty, the two brothers went to the stream to drink as well as cleaning and filling the flask.

"Where are we?" Zach wondered.

"Still in the Reserve, I think we're in the mountains west of the valley that we crossed during the safari," Gray answered after scanning the landscape in front of them and realizing that I couldn't be the one of the west coast.

The bellow of a dinosaur coming from this direction confirmed his assumption.

"We must go back to the City," Zach declared. "The village is our nearest way-out but where is it for fuck's sake?"

Gray searched the pocket of his shorts and took out his now sullied park map.

"South from here according to the map," he said, pointing to a picture representing a cluster of thatched buildings near the map's centre, at the base of the Western Cordillera.

Zach leaned over it.

"The problem with this map is that it's too cartoony and lacks many details. The chasm in which he had fallen is not even on it," he remarked. "If we use it, we will get lost."

Zach was right. Only the most important reliefs were featured on the map while the Reserve was anything but a huge dark green mass dotted with light green spots – the open areas – and populated with dinosaurs' silhouettes.

"We could use the map of the soldier, there was the reliefs and the roads on it," Gray suggested, remembering the topographic map they had found.

"Not dumb…"

Zach took the map out of the bag, unfolded it and flattened it in the middle of the rocks at their feet. He looked at the year of edition: 1993.  
There were a number of buildings and facilities named "Visitor Center/ Administration", "Electricity", "Hammond Bungalow", "Emergency Bunker", "Safari Lodge", "Geothermal Power Plant", "Desalinization/Water Treatment Plant", "Quarantine", "North Dock" and "East Dock". Zach distinguished a network of roads, tunnels and buildings isolated here and there in the eastern third of the island, usually next to large areas with rounded contours, each designated by one or several codes:

 _TYRA, DILO, VELO, PROC, BRAC, GALL, TRIC, PARA, STEG, PTER, METR, BARY, HERR, SEGI_

They examined these large areas, separated from the roads by concrete moats and/or fences accompanied by a sign that featured a lightning symbol. These were the enclosures of the old park, mentioned many times in the media. In the centre of the southernmost paddock, whose code had been crossed out, a large black circle had been drawn and "MAIN CONSTRUCTION SITE" (Base Camp) had been written next to it, over the current location of Burroughs. Near the volcano and one of the mountains in the east, small red circles were pointed by arrows that started from the following annotation, written in red " _Horrors are lurking in the depths_ ", while in a marsh in the southern part of the island, it was written " _Here live the three spitters bitches…_ "  
But the annotation that attracted Zach's attention the most, written in small characters at the bottom of the map, was: " _The night is dark and full of terrors..._ ".  
These words said something to the young man who would have sworn to have already read or heard them somewhere else, but this annotation and all the others, written during the time of the construction of Jurassic World, were mysterious and disturbing.  
The person who wrote them must have been terrified by something that was haunting the island at that time but since the end of the construction, no one had been killed in the park until the second day of their visit. Whatever their nature was, these "horrors" had disappeared many years ago, like if they had been nothing more than a legend, and the two Mitchells didn't gave these annotations much attention.

Zach then thought about the route they could take.

"I propose that we go to the valley, turn south and cross the river to join this old road and follow it along the cliffs. We should end back on the safari road, that we could follow. Sooner or later, we would reach the village, located in this area. What do you think?"

But his brother did not answer.

"Gray?"

Zach turned around and saw that his brother had taken a sharp stone and was drawing lines on a wall. He had begun to represent the mountains and the course of the Loudwater or at least how he thought it was like.

"Come on, we don't have the time for that," he told him.

"If someone is tracking us, he will know where we're heading."

"Gray. Claire must think we're dead," Zach stated in a serious tone. "No one could believe that we managed to make it out alive after what happened. I thought we would die inside that truck. We can only count on ourselves. Come! I would like to be back at the city before dark."

Before he dropped his stone, Gray quickly signed his unfinished work with their names. Zach was probably right and maybe no one will found this map but deep-down, he knew that there was a small chance that someone had found their tracks.

"Gray!"

"I'm coming!"

As he trotted to join his brother who was walking along the stream, he suddenly stopped when a strong tremor travelled through the island's ground.

"Move away from the walls!" Zach shouted at him when he saw stones falling off the walls and tumbling down.

The brothers moved away from their trajectory and went to stand on a large rock in the middle of the valley, where the terrain was relatively flat, until the tremor and rocks falling stopped.

"Another tremor," Gray said, worried.

"As strong as the one from last night. I don't like this. Let's move."

They waited for a few moments and then resumed their journey, looking closely at their environment.

"It's a bit like in _Game of Thrones_ ," Gray stated.

"How?"

"When Bran Stark has to go beyond the Wall to see the Three-eyed Raven. Like him, we must cross a dangerous land at the risk of our lives despite our age."

"Except that, unlike him, you're not a cripple and there is no snow to slow us so our journey should be easier than his. I hope so. And thinking about it, I don't know what's the worse between undead and dinosaurs."

"The undead clearly. Dinosaurs don't resurrect you as one of theirs after killing you."

"That's not wrong."

The further they went, the more the rocks gave way to vegetation, and they soon felt the grass whipping their calves.

"I doubt that it pleases mom that you watch this kind of tv series, it can be pretty violent sometimes," Zach resumed soon after.

"What we saw and experienced earlier was violent too..." Gray reminded him in a weak voice.

"Yeah," Zach said in a neutral tone. "I'm starving… I would kill for a burger with some French fries. Don't you?" He suddenly said in a slightly more lighter tone in order to avoid to talk about the horror related to the truck.

"The same."

Before entering the jungle, Zach picked up a piece of wood and weighed it up in his hand, checking its solidity.  
Judging that it was strong enough to use it as mean of defence, he kept it in his right hand. He told his brother to stay behind him and they passed under the shade of the trees.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _I started to regroup all the published chapters in a PDF file which will also include maps. So if you feel that there are errors that need to be fixed, don't hesitate to inform me by sending me a PM. I will keep you informed about its release date._


	51. The Giant's Fist

"What is this?" Grady wondered.

In the darkness, his foot had stumbled into a thin object and the noise of crumpled paper had been heard. He lit his feet and leaned over to pick up a charm magazine.

" _October 2002_ ," he read on the cover. "How did you end up here?"

After careful inspection, he said:

"Anyway, you don't look too bad. You will join my collection..."

Standing behind him, Dearing gave him a heavy look.

"What? I didn't want to let it rot here."

"If we stop so that you can pick up all the curious items lying on the ground, we'll still be here tomorrow. You are not in a role-playing game," she grumbled.

They saw the skeletons in front of them.

"Ah, your nephews turned into dead robbers. They took only what they thought was useful," Grady observed, inspecting the objects left on the floor. "Resourceful and clever as they seems to be, they might have a chance to get through the Reserve."

Dearing, then kneeling by the conquistador, came to the second skeleton, lit by the flashlight.

"It's an employee of the security division," she said. "Most likely one of those who disappeared during the construction."

They got up and began to climb the steps leading to the next tunnel.

"I've noted that this part of Jurassic World's story was vague," he said. "Do you have any intel to share with me?"

"Once, I wanted to access the files about the activities of the security division at that time, out of curiosity you know, but even with my status of park director, access was refused," Dearing told him.

"Odd."

Grady heard like a little jingling behind him, coming from Dearing. From the corner of his eye, he had seen her searching the ground under the skeleton of the conquistador, at the very spot where he had briefly glimpsed coins when the flashlight passed in this area.

"Don't you want to put in the bag the coins that you slipped in your bra?"

He had asked this question in a disinterested tone, which surprised Dearing a little.

"No coarse comment from you? Is the air of the cave making you sick?"

"Let's say that I see the reasons that pushes you to have some backup money. I don't know what these coins are worth nowadays but by dealing with the right person, maybe you'll get a nice sum out of them. It will be a shame that you lose some of them just by leaning."

"Yeah. Thinking about it, they will be better in your bag."

Once at the top of the steps, she took out the ten gold coins she had picked up and put them in the top pocket of Grady's bag.

"You can have a small percentage if you want," she told him.

"Thank you for the proposal but I decline because I don't think I need it," he humbly refused.

They left the cave a quarter of an hour later.

"A map. Too bad they didn't finish it and trace their trajectory," Grady said as he noticed the wall on which it was drawn. "From here, it will be much harder to track them down. And more dangerous too ... We are likely to encounter dinosaurs in the valley," He added, glaring at the jungle down the slope that Dearing looked at thoughtfully.

"To say that I just need to call the control room to ask them the location of any of the Reserve's dinosaurs but that we are unable to find people lost inside," she said.  
"Unless…"

Her eyes widened.

"I just had an idea to help us track them. I just need some signal."

She took out her phone and looked out for some signal but not finding any in the vale, she looked behind them, searching for some high spot where her phone could eventually receive signal.  
Next to the cavern's entrance and between the spurs of the mountain in the shadow of which they were, stood a tall rock with a flattened top, dominating the vale, a dyke that had been named the Giant's Fist because of its general shape that evoked a closed fist.  
This rock was best known for featuring a series of steps that were carved in it long ago, forming a spiral staircase to the top.

"Claire, I have a radio. If you could..."

She did not hear him since she had already started to climb the stairs at full speed.

"Never mind..." Grady muttered while he was heading to the stairs he hurried to climb in order to reduce the distance between him and her.

Near the middle of the stairs, a piece of one of the steps crumbled when Dearing stepped on it and she would have fallen back if Grady had not managed to catch her in time. With his help, she found her balance back and she turned to give him a grateful look.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. Be careful! These stairs aren't new."

"I think I heard of them once. No one know who carved them."

"Exactly. According to the Tun Si's oral tradition, it was already there back in the sixteenth century."

When they reached the top, as the sun was high in the sky, Grady took the radio out of his bag, switch it on and passed it to Dearing. She turned the buttons to find the frequency that allowed her to contact the control room and once she found it, she put the radio closer to her mouth.

"Control. Dearing here. Do you copy?"

A few seconds passed before someone answered her.

" _Claire!_ " Krill exclaimed. " _We were worried. Where are you?_ "

"In the mountains of the Western Cordillera, at the top of the Giant's Fist."

" _You are in the Reserve and far from any infrastructure? Are you crazy?!_ " Cruthers panicked. " _It would be wise for you to come back. Hoskins is here and he is not very happy! He even thought you were about to leave the island and never return!_ "

"He will have to wait!" Dearing said. "I didn't make all this way to turn back now. I have one thing to do and I shall do it! Don't worry about me. I am not alone," she added, looking at Grady who saw a glimmer of complicity in her eyes at this moment.

" _You're with Owen, right? You told him to fuck off not even a few hours ago and of all the people on the island, you went to seek his help? It's not going to shut the rumors about you two, you know_."

"Fuck those! If I call you, it's to tell you that my nephews are alive, Zara might have already informed you about this. But the problem is that we lost their track. From the Giant's Fist vale, they could have gone anywhere through the Reserve and I would like to know if we could use the motion sensors and photographic recognition to determine where they are?"

While the chief technician was thinking about this suggestion, they remained silent.

" _The difficulty is that, based on the fact that nobody would get lost in the Reserve, the photographic recognition's algorithm was not designed to recognize human shapes and so, they must have been counted as Others, just like every animal that doesn't belong to the prehistoric fauna of the Reserve and of a size equal or superior to the one of a raccoon. In order to find your nephews, we would have to scroll through the pictures taken by the cameras traps associated to the sensors that had counted animals notified as Others one by one. We're talking about hundreds of pictures to look at. It will take time and if ever we find them through this process, you can be sure that we will be one step ahead of you,_ " he explained.

"We must try. Whenever you find Zach and Gray, send us the coordinates of the sensors they passed by so we can put them on Owen's map, guiding us towards them."

" _This is the best solution we have anyway. If only the sensors covered the banks of the Loudwater and its valley… We could have used them to find the other survivors. While I have you at the other end of the line, I inform you that a big storm is coming from the west. It will stay over the island for most of the afternoon. I hope that you took a raincoat…_ "

"Shit," Grady swore. "I knew I forgot something when we left."

"A little late but thank you anyway," Dearing said. "We do as planned. Thank you."

She ended the communication and turned to look at Grady, who seemed to be staring in the distance, admiring the view from the top of the dyke.

"What a view..." Dearing said, filled with wonder, when she joined him.

They had an incredible panorama that encompassed not only the vale but also the western valley, the plateau next to it, Mount Sibo, the black and arid land of Little Gorgoroth, as well as the saddle at the western end of the Embrace and further east, rose the distant and menacing Misty Mounts.  
No human building or infrastructure was visible for kilometres around, as if the island had remained wild and untamed all these years, Jurassic World never existed and the events of the morning never took place, a feel that was accentuated by the sounds of the wildlife and the melodious calls of some dinosaurs.  
Dearing had the impression of being in front of a lost world that had been preserved since the end of the Mesozoic era, almost sixty-six millions years ago, and suddenly, she felt very little in front of this wild land, dominated by the mountains and isolated with Grady on top of the dyke.  
He looked at her and smiled.  
They remained there for a few moments, watching the landscape, like two explorers facing unexplored and inhospitable lands that had always resisted to Civilization.

"As you said, you cannot go back anymore," he said a bit later, while they were walking along the stream in the vale. "The only thing you can do is move forward, even if it means going ahead of the danger. Here, you are not in control of anything and you have to accept it."

He then spoke with a deeper voice and a more solemn tone, like if he was impersonating some old and wise mentor and Dearing couldn't help but to have a small grin.

"The world is not in the binders or the computer you left, no. The world is ahead, and you are at its mercy. It's up to you to adapt to Nature and not the other way around. Listen to my advices and you should get through this. If you survive this journey, you will be a totally different woman at the end…"

As they were about to enter the jungle and Grady humming one of the themes of a famous sword and sorcery film of the early eighties, a thunderclap resounded far behind them, beyond the peaks that suddenly became threatening.  
Cruthers warned them that a storm was coming. It was for the moment above the ocean but by judging the loudness of the noise and looking at the speed of the wind, Grady knew it was going to be over them soon.


	52. Across the Valley

While their aunt and Grady were at the Giant's Fist, Zach and Gray had almost reached the river in the middle of the plain.

The grass was so high that the blades reached Zach's waist and Gray had to stand on his toes to better see around him.  
At about thirty meters, dryosaurs grazed, heads down and raising them only from time to time to watch the two young humans while they chewed.  
To the south, half a dozen blue-mottled brown dinosaurs were also eating.

Bipeds too, but of a much more robust constitution, the largest individuals measured four meters fifty long and one meter fifty high. The most prominent feature of these animals was their skull, topped by a large and thick bony dome while their pointed beak was adorned with small bony spikes.  
They were watching the boys, staring at them like a bull would at intruders in his pasture and making Zach feel uncomfortable. He closed his grip around the branch.  
Although he wasn't as well versed in dinosaurs as his brother, Zach still had recognized this species of dinosaurs, pachycephalosaurs or dinos-monks like many called them because of the dome and the crown of small and thick horns girding it that evoked a tonsure. He knew that they behaved a bit like buffaloes and therefore, he led Gray as far as possible from them.  
Before studies on the behavior of these dinosaurs were published, pachycephalosaurs used to be portrayed in books charging head-first, like Musk oxen or mouflons. But despite the fact that they indeed used their skull as a defensive mean, they sought instead to rush on the sides of their opponents, other individuals during ritual fights or predators, and hit them with their crown of horns. About the latter, one could estimate the age of the individuals by looking at their degree of wear.

Avoiding making sudden moves that could trigger an unwanted reaction in the pachycephalosaurs, Zach and Gray continued towards the cliffs beyond the river and which they planned to skirt in order to find a road or a path that would allow them to reach the area between the plateau's meadow and the edge of the Loudwater valley.  
In the northeast, they saw some large black birds, vultures, circling over the cliffs and they wondered what they had seen before remembering that some of the passengers, a _Parasaurolophus_ and a mounted guard had fallen from these same cliffs.  
When they imagined the vultures landing on the disarticulated bodies below and starting to eat them, they turned their gaze away to look straight ahead.

When the Mitchells arrived at the edge of the river, they noticed that something of a disturbing nature had happened since they had crossed it at a ford further upstream when they were aboard the truck: The water level had drastically lowered and it now barely reached their ankles.  
Zach thought that if the river was natural, the spring had dried up while if it was artificial, the mechanism that brought water to the source must have been deactivated, as a result of the probable evacuation of the sector.  
When they crossed the river, they saw that the fish had difficulties to swim and some had been trapped between rocks at the bottom of the bed, wriggling in vain to try to get out.  
Only the boys' shoes and socks got wet again and this was not to displease them since they had enough of water for the whole week after the Loudwater.

After this obstacle, which crossing had been easier than expected, they turned south, towards where the cliffs made way to a softer relief, covered by the jungle. They passed at the very same spot where they had spotted the herd of Bucephalus and returned under the trees.

Every time they heard calls or saw tracks and others signs indicating the presence of large animals, Zach led his brother in the opposite direction in order to avoid having the wrong kind of encounters, forcing them to make some detours during their ascent among the undergrowth. When they were back at the same altitude as the top of the cliffs, they noticed that the western sky had become dark and that the mountains of the Western Cordillera, their wooded slopes as well as a part of the plain were already in the shadows.

X

Kneeling in the grass, map in hand, Dearing drew a cross at the coordinates that Krill had just communicated them through the radio.  
She had also told her that Young had arrived at the control room and was helping them with their task. It was the latter who, as she was scrolling on her laptop the photos taken by the sensors, had seen on one of them two human shapes behind a bush, shapes that she had recognized as the nephews of Dearing and immediately informed Krill who transmitted the coordinates of the motion sensor to her boss along with the time at which the photo had been taken.

She got up and gestured to Grady that they could continue.

"Let's hurry to cross the valley," he pressed her after looking at the clouds passing over them while the thunder was getting closer and closer. "The dinos had already took shelter," he added and the plain was indeed empty, except for a heron hunting in the distance.

Walking at a quick pace, they arrived at the edge of the river.  
Between the moment when Zach and Gray had crossed it and the one of the arrival of Dearing and Grady, the water had disappeared, leaving only scattered puddles in the bottom of the riverbed, where fish were weakly wriggling, dying with their mouths open.  
Thus exposed, they made the piscivores and the scavengers happy. In addition to a heron and a few egrets, there were also two unenlagias which walked in the riverbed in a jerky manner, just like the birds with which they were competing. As soon as they were close to a fish, they swooped on it and maintained it on the spot by sinking their sickle-like claws in the flesh. Then, they closed their thin jaws around their prey and arched their neck back to swallow it greedily.

When they saw the two humans descend the bank, they looked at them with curiosity and decided to approach carefully as they were attracted by the shiny reflections of Dearing's watch, similar to those of the scales of some fishes.  
At the moment when one of the ash theropods was on the verge of swooping on Dearing's wrist to steal her watch, Grady suddenly and loudly clapped in his hands.  
Dearing jumped and the unenlagias stopped in their tracks to look at Grady.

"Shoo! Shoo!" He said to them before chasing the two animals with large hand and arms gestures.

Intimidated, the unenlagias didn't insist and cleared out, vainly flapping their wings while they ran, like if it helped them to evacuate their frustration.

"None of the trucks that passed here this morning told us that river was dry. How the water did suddenly disappeared? Even when the rain comes late, there is always at least twenty centimeters," she said once they were on the other side.

"The answer to your question is at the source. Something blocked it."

Grady didn't added anything to his answer and just stared at the volcano.  
In the north-east, some vultures were still circling over the cliffs and with these birds in the sky, the storm about to burst over the plain and the dried up river and its dying fish behind them, Dearing and Grady had no longer the impression of being in the same idyllic valley they had always knew and which was still conform to this vision when they were looking at it from the top of the Giant's Fist. They knew that a whole time was over.


	53. Control IV

Knowing where Dearing was thanks to her conversation with Cruthers, Hoskins had called back the officers he had sent searching for her.  
However, he was still furious at her since by leaving the administration to go search for her nephews, she wasn't overseeing the management of the crisis. Even if she was accompanied by Grady, he thought she was foolish to walk through the Reserve.

"Guys? There is something weird about the animals of the Reserve," Adamson declared.

Hoskins saw Cruthers get up to go to her and curious, he did the same.

"What?" The chief technician asked, leaning over Adamson's console.

She displayed on her screen a map that contained hundreds of bright dots associated with the dinosaurs of Sector Four. They were distributed relatively homogeneously within the Reserve.

"There is nothing abnormal," Cruthers stated, "we always had this kind of distribution."

"It's the one from eleven o'clock, just before the stampede," she said.

She displayed other maps, each showing a different distribution of the dots.

"If I compare it to those of noon, one pm and two pm, what do you notice?"

By displaying the maps in the chronological order, Cruthers noticed that the distribution of the dots became less and less homogenous as they started to get more and more concentrated in the southern part of the sector.  
On the one from two pm, three-quarters of the dots were concentrated in or around the central fields and in the vicinity of the safari village, leaving only small groups of scattered dots in the Western Valley, the plateau nearby and the Embrace.

"They're migrating south, why?"

Then Cruthers remembered the tremor they had felt shortly after one pm and the one that had occurred the night before.

"Animals feel natural disasters in advance, even dinos born in laboratories while we are unable of that," Adamson stated. "It probably has something to do with the increasing activity of Mount Sibo. The tremor from earlier was of magnitude 5.2, more than the one from last night."

"Have a look at the latest satellite images," another technician told them as he displayed the images on the main screen.

He zoomed on the Western Valley and they all realized that the river was gone, leaving only a brown strip in the middle of the fields.

"It dried up in less than two hours," he told them.

"Springs drying up is one of the warning signs of a volcanic eruption," Hoskins said. "They had stated this in a documentary about the destruction of Pompeii."

"That's what the latest data from the geothermal power plant are indicating as well," the technician added, looking on his screen.

"Its eruption is imminent," Cruthers said with dread in his voice. "It's only a matter of a few days… or hours. Like if we needed that…"

"Another reason to settle the Indominus' situation as soon as possible, with all the means in our possession. Otherwise we are going to fight on two different fronts," Hoskins declared.

Masrani came back in the control room at this moment and the director of the security division greeted him with a nod and a respectful "sir".

"I didn't knew you were here Victor."

"You must know the reason behind my presence."

"I haven't been informed of your arrival but honestly, it's a good thing that you are here. Your advices have been valuable to me in the past. If you have some, let me know."

"I have an idea but it's not of the most common."

"Please, tell me more."

Hoskins led Masrani to a corner of the room so that they could talk in a low voice without the technicians hearing them.

"As you may know, my division funds the IBRIS research program, the one led by Mr. Grady and which concern the achillobators. I have been watching his progress since more than three years. We could use these animals to find the I. rex."

Masrani frowned, uncertain of the idea.

"He can hide in the jungle and escape all our technological means of detection," continued the director of the security division, "he won't be able to be left undetected by the developed senses of the raptors."

"The IBRIS program aims to study their intelligence, not to turn them into sniffer dogs," Masrani retorted with disdain.

"Indeed, and that's what had been done. But we also learned that they could obey orders. We just need to show them the piece of flesh that the guards have found so that they can track him."

"Let me be clear. No raptors are going to be set loose on this island, we already have enough predators out of containment," Masrani said in calm but firm voice.

"The solution to this crisis is within your reach," Hoskins insisted. "Once the raptors will have found the I. rex, we could have him within range and stop him. On this matter, what is your order?"

"I don't know yet."

"You don't know what to do with him? With all due respect, sir, and without wanting to rush you, you have to decide quickly because he can attack the guards tracking the metris at any moment. One of my friends died in an ambush in Afghanistan because command was slow to give them clear orders and it's easy to get ambushed in the kind of environment in which the guards are. Even armed forces as trained and disciplined as the Roman legions or the GI's had been decimated in forests. And as you know, I know something about this since the same kind of situation happened fourteen years ago to some of my men, on this very same island. The fate of Hamada and his men depends on your decision."

Masrani looked thoughtful.

"It's hard to decide. I would like to think that we can still capture him and put him back in his paddock. Then we could state that the metriacanthosaurs incident was just an accident and everything would get back to normal. With luck, we can regain control. The chaos was limited to the Reserve after all."

From Hoskins point of view, Masrani was deluding himself but he had to make him understand.

"The Reserve has been evacuated, it's a good thing. But about the rest of the park, what do we do, especially with the Sibo's imminent awakening?" Hoskins asked, pointing to the areas still open on the real-time map. "We have thousands of people who are not suspecting a thing. The I. rex has already thwart the established plans to sow chaos. Even though he is miles away from the closest opened attraction, we need to get ready."

"If we realize that he's too close from the eastern limit of the Reserve, evacuate the sector beyond. Everyone along with the most valuable assets within half a dozen of kilometres from the volcano must also be brought south, just in case. As for your plans concerning the raptors, I will look at it to determine its viability within the moral principles of this company."

"Understood, sir. Come see me as soon as you made your decision."


	54. The Hunt

During the forty minutes that followed the encounter with Spectre, the guards didn't came across any other dinosaur and throughout their progression, the jungle became more and more silent and gloomy while above the canopy, the sky darkened. As planned, the teams deployed upstream contacted them by radio at five past one to report.

At half past one, they were once again contacted:

" _Cole's here. Nothing to report at the central pass_ ," Maleko Cole's voice said first.

" _Rössler's here. Nothing to report at the southern pass_ ," said a woman with a German accent.

Hamada waited a few seconds for a communication from Sandros, whose team was deployed at the northern pass. He did not have any. Hamada contacted Sandros:

"Sandros. Hamada's here. Report please."

The radio only made statics.

"Answer Sandros!"

Hamada tried a third time but in vain.

"What are they doing?" Brunet growled.

"I am asking myself the same question," Hamada said. "If we pass near the northern pass, we should sent some men to find out about their whereabouts."

" _It's been twenty minutes since I lost their life signals_ ," Harriman intervened on the radio. " _I thought it was due to a bug or a transmission failure but the fact that they didn't answer the radio is very worrying._ "

"I fear the worst," Hamada said.

A little further, he suddenly stopped when a troop of _Compsognathus_ appeared on their left. The little predators regrouped across their way, looked at the guards, chirped for a second or two and then disappeared under the bushes and the ferns to their right, moving down the slope.

"Look at them," pointed Bellamy, then behind Hamada's shoulder. "They must had picked up some interesting scent."

"A dying animal. Or an already dead one," Brunet completed.

"Maybe one of the passengers broke his leg or something like this? If they find him before us, he or she won't have a chance," Rahim added.

"Perhaps," Hamada said.

"They are going in the same direction as us," Brunet observed as he watched the _Compsognathus_ move along the stream.

"Let's follow them then," Hamada decided. "With luck, they will lead us to the metriacanthosaurs."

The guards hurtled down the slope and began to follow the _Compsognathus_.

A furlong further, as they were almost in sight of the entrance of the northern pass, a few heard the thickets and the bushes rustle on top of a slope on their right.

"Something is watching us," remarked one of the members of the company. "It can't be the metris," Drekanson noticed after a look on his smartwatch. "Neither the Indominus, it's too small."

"Nothing that deserves our attention, we'd better keep going," Bellamy said.

They resumed their walk but they barely had the time to make a few steps that Darbinian heard a humming behind them. She swiftly turned and saw a small black ball finishing to cross the dell.

"Spy drone!" She shouted.

"Hunt it down!" Brunet immediately ordered.

He had glimpsed it at the last moment and the guards were forced to send their last drone at its pursuit.

The Farfadet quickly disappeared behind the vegetation and Hamada and Brunet came to Verplancke to follow the chase on his screen while Rahim was as focused on his as a rally driver during a race, moving frantically the joystick while the Farfadet slalomed between the trees.

"Are you sure it's a spy?" Turner asked Darbinian.

"I think she is right. It's neither one of ours, nor of those used by the park," Verplancke replied instead. "I wonder who it belongs to."

"Maybe a joker tourist or a reporter a little too curious," Durant supposed. "Well, whoever is the whorechild playing on our nerves, sparks will fly if we find him or her," Brunet grumbled.

The Farfadet had found the mysterious drone but the latter beign more agile and more manoeuvrable, it struggled to keep the pace. However, they managed to have a visual contact for a moment and Verplancke took the opportunity to have a look at the mysterious drone.

"For what I see, the model doesn't tell me anything," he said. "It looks like some kind of military prototype. Our spy seems to have a lot of resources and nice connections."

There was only fifteen meters left between the two drones.  
Rahim thought that the Farfadet might be able to catch up the spy drone if he accelerates, even if it meant to use the battery more.

"Come on, Rahim. Catch this fucker!" Baker encouraged him.

The Farfadet suddenly accelerated and the distance separating it from the other drone shrank considerably, to the point that there was less than six meters but the hunted one rose towards the canopy, quickly gaining height and it disappeared above the foliage.  
Rahim suppressed a grunt and redoubled in dexterity in his manipulation of the joystick. The Farfadet gained altitude and emerged from the shadows of the jungle through a gap in the foliage.

Above a large part of the northern half of Isla Nublar, the sky had become so dark that under the trees, there was hardly more light than at the dusk hours of a sunny day.  
They saw the unknown drone further, hovering above the canopy like a buoy floating in the middle of a green sea.  
The Farfadet rushed towards it, passing over the trees' crowns. Suddenly, the other drone disappeared under the canopy as a large grey bird was flapping his wings. The bird, a Harpy eagle, was flying towards the Farfadet and in the matter of just a few seconds, it swooped on it and the guards' drone didn't managed to escape. The large black talons came closer to the camera and the footage on the remote's screen shook as the raptor was attacking the drone.  
The guards heard the Farfadet fall through the foliage and when it crashed on the forest floor, the camera only showed a carpet of dead leaves in the dim light of an undergrowth.

"Fucking harpy!" Rahim grumbled.

"Great!" Bellamy said sarcastically. "That was our last drone. We can only rely on our eyes now."

Deeply annoyed by the loss of their drone, the company set off again, following the stream and walking at a quicker pace in order to catch up with the _Compsognathus_.

They saw some of them at the entrance of the pass, more interested by the insects that flew low than by the trail that was followed by most of the troop, somewhere in the pass whose walls were covered with creepers. Said pass was the northern one.

"Sandros and the three sent with him should be posted on these rocks, to see whoever arrives from downstream," Brunet said, looking at the entrance of the pass.

"They are not at their posts," Hamada observed. "Where are they?"

As they advanced, they saw that one of the rocks was stained with blood.

"I should have sent more men with them," Hamada reproached himself after letting out a short swear in Japanese.

He and Brunet turned to their subordinates. They were whispering to each other, worried about the fate of Sandros' team and watching the pass with suspicion. Above, the thunder rolled loudly and they began to feel droplets of water land on their skin.

"Let's move! There may be more clues about their fate upstream," Hamada declared. "Call Cole and Rössler. Tell them to meet us at the Devil's Chair."

Because of the imminent rainfall, the guards put grey-green hooded cloaks over them.  
The droplets turned into drops and the members of the company silently entered the pass, forcing on their way the compys to join their troop further ahead.

They reached its end some sixty meters further and saw trees on both sides of the stream.  
The company noticed that the _Compsognathus_ were zigzagging among the rocks and near them, a red trail was being carried by the current. Blood.  
Hamada motioned to the company to stop and looked at his smartwatch. He saw that two of three signals associated with the metiacanthosaurs were flashing at a quick pace on the screen: They were close.

The officers joined Hamada to briefly discuss the strategy they were going to adopt.  
Since the wind was blowing eastward, they agreed to pass through the thickets on their right and separate further into two groups. One would cross the stream upstream from the metriacanthosaurs' location, to bypass them while being leeward and thus attack them from the rear by surprise.

Progressing through the dense vegetation and listening carefully to the excited chirps of the compys, the company cut through the thickets while the sound of rain and thunder muffled the ones of their steps.  
As planned, the company halted and formed two attack groups: Hamada and Drekanson took half of the men and continued straight ahead while Brunet, Bellamy and the rest of the company, including Darbinian, Verplancke, Turner, Tian and Velasquez followed the signals.

A little ahead of the others, marching next to Darbinian, Turner suddenly felt her knuckles hit his breastplate.

"Don't move!" She ordered in a whisper. "They will hear us if we continue like this."

She turned and motioned for the others to stop and make no sound. Brunet ordered everyone to crouch and they followed him, crawling to the top of an embankment near which Darbinian had stopped. Through a small gap in the thickets' foliage, they saw the last two subadult metriacanthosaurs devouring a prey, a man, lying on the back.

It wasn't one of the passengers and the guards immediately noticed with horror that the corpse wore a grey-green uniform under his breastplate. They also recognized the red hairs of the victim. It was McKormick, which was supposed to watch over the pass with Sandros.

"Oh my God, they killed McKormick…" Turner said, shocked.

"You bastards…," Velasquez groaned.

"I'm afraid that Sandros and the others had suffered a similar fate but I don't see them," Verplancke added in a worried voice.

"Silence!" Brunet commanded.

They shut up and analysed the situation while the _Compsognathus_ arrived on the scene.  
The little green dinosaurs jumped excitedly, looking at McKormick's body with appetite. Their concert of shrill squawking draw the attention of the metriacanthosaurs and annoyed, the dark brown predators raised their blood-stained snouts. One of them took a few steps towards the _Compsognathus_ and let out a small warning roar.  
He stood firm in front of the corpse, grunting at them, but some of the compys proved to be very rash, too much to the guards' taste, and rushed towards McKormick to tear off some pieces of flesh just in front of the other metriacanthosaur.  
Seeing the _Compsognathus_ stealing right under his snout, he raised his head and roared at them. One of the compys was so surprised that it staggered and lost its balance.  
Angered by the small scavengers' impudence, the metriacanthosaurs decided that it was enough.  
The one who was standing in the way of most of the _Compsognathus_ swooped in the middle of their troop and grabbed one between his jaws, raising screams of pain and terror from the little dinosaur before crushing its frail body.

As he was swallowing what was just an appetiser for a metriacanthosaur, his brother leaned over McKormick and when he pulled the end of his snout from inside the ribcage, the guards saw that the stomach was hanging from his mouth. He then shook it in the air, splashing the stones around with its content.  
Turner became livid and put his fist in front of his mouth and Tian turned quickly on her back to look instead at the treetops while breathing at a fast pace.

"Take your positions," Brunet ordered. "Turner. Stay here and take aim. You will know when to shoot."

Turner nodded and put his rifle beside him before laying his eyes on the metriacanthosaurs, watching all their comings and goings.

The others quietly descended the embankment backwards and got back up farther back to wait, hidden behind the trees and watching through the foliage the metriacanthosaurs eating and the _Compsognathus_ , calmed by the death of a member of their troop, waiting silently at a good distance in the hope they would get some scraps once the larger predators will be full.  
The density of vegetation along the stream prevented the rangers to aim at the carnosaurs from the shades of the thickets and the only decent window they had was the embankment on which Turner had taken position. Once he will shoot, their presence would be revealed and the way the skirmish was going to unfold depended on the Englishman's skill.  
If he managed to shoot one of the animals, the few hoplites of the platoon would be able to contain the other long enough for the shooters to take aim and kill him too.

When the long cooing of a bird came to Brunet's ears, he pulled out a decoy from one of his pockets and blew in, producing a sound like the one he had just heard and a few moments later, he got an answer, a cooing interrupted by a shrill cry, coming from the woods beyond the opposite bank of the stream.  
Brunet blew again in his decoy, but this time, he made a shrill cry first, followed by a cooing.  
The sound was so loud that all, guards and dinosaurs alike, heard it.

Intrigued, the metiacanthosaurs raised their heads and looked for a few seconds towards the trees where Brunet's group was lurking.

While the raindrops were hitting his shoulders, Brunet looked around him. His men were silent and although they looked nervous, they were ready to fight and holding their weapons firmly. They were only waiting for his order.

A series of loud, repeated and strident calls suddenly fill the air of the dell.  
The metriacanthosaurs looked around, on the look-out.  
Suddenly, one of them stiffened and collapsed on the side among the stones and the _Compsognathus_ , surprised, jumped back.

"Nice shot, Turner," Brunet complimented in a low voice.

The other metriacanthosaur took a few steps towards his brother's body, sniffed, and pushed it with the tip of his snout.  
It was at this moment that the guards closed their trap around him.

Having getting rid of their cloaks just before in order to not have their movements hindered, the hoplites charged first amidst rain and lightning, spears lowered and shields hold against the body.  
The metriacanthosaur roared at them but as he was about to charge them, more hoplites emerged from the undergrowth behind him.  
Frightened, the _Compsognathus_ scattered in all directions at once in a cacophony and not even worrying about them, with some even passing in the middle of the running compys, the hoplites went to surround the metriacanthosaur while the rest of the guards left the cover of the trees.  
Standing behind their shields, the hoplites pointed their spears at the predator and he grunted relentlessly. When he tried to snap at one of the hoplites, the latter swiftly speared him and yelled. Overwhelmed by his assailants' number, Philippe panted out of panic and scanned the hoplites and the shooters behind them that were taking aim but suddenly, one of those closest to the thickets was lifted in the air.

Something powerful had grabbed the back of his breastplate and frantically shaking the guard who was kicking the air with his legs and screaming in the midst of the grunts of the animals that was attacking him, those of an adult metriacanthosaur. Taking advantage of the sudden irruption of his father that had surprised the company, Philippe charged those who faced him. The hoplites reoriented their spears too late and thanks to violent head blows, he made them stagger and managed to get out of the melee.

"Hey! Let him go!" Baker shouted at Boomer before throwing a big stone on the corner of his skull.

Boomer dropped his prey into the stream and some hoplites immediately speared him to make him step back while their comrade stood up.  
But the adult metriacanthosaur was fiercer than his offspring and he charged them while Philippe was returning to the fight to help his father, slaloming to avoid the shots. Each on one side, they had surrounded the guards and the skirmish quickly took a chaotic turn as the two carnivores threw themselves at them, trying to claw or bite them and those who were attacked had to act with good agility to dodge them.

Due to the fact that the two metiacanthosaurs were continuously moving, the fusiliers struggled to aim at them and sometimes were restraining themselves to fire, fearing to hit their comrades. As for the rangers, their sniper rifles were of no use in such a situation and they decided to take their bows instead. That's what Darbinian had done. She was moving sideways on the periphery of the combat zone, fixing the predators and waiting for a window. An outside observer would have been particularly captivated by the way the hoplites in particular were fighting against the metriacanthosaurs, pivoting to avoid their attacks before retaliating in a flash while still moving, in a style almost akin to a dance.  
But the carnivores weren't willing to yield. It seemed that they weren't even considering the guards as preys but rather as rival predators and they were fighting them with the same ferocity and determination as two lions battling a troop of hyenas over a carcass.

In the heart of the fight, Philippe attempted to claw Bellamy and if she had not raised her shield in time to protect her head, he would have cleaved her face.  
The claws hit the metal with such force that she bent and fell on her back.  
The metriacanthosaur stood above her with his mouth open, preparing to slain her.  
An arrow, shoot by Darbinian, sank in the dinosaur's chest and he grunted before receiving another one, this time in the shoulder.  
He stepped back and Bellamy got up again and raised her spear.  
A third arrow whistled over the dinosaur's head. He turned and fled, disappearing behind the vegetation.  
Only Boomer was left.

As the adult metiacanthosaurus was about to grab one of the guards close to him, Drekanson grabbed his netgun and pulled the trigger.  
A net came out of the barrel of the weapon and was projected on the head of the carnivore.  
Greatly hindered, the latter shook his head but despite this, he continued his attacks.

With a powerful tail-blow, he swept the guards behind him, throwing them to the ground and knocking out some, and clawed the air in front of those standing in front of him.  
Boomer managed to get rid of the net and immediately, he threw himself at Hamada, who had momentarily turned his back. Having noticed Brunet rushing into the jungle to chase down the subadult carnivore, he had briefly turned to order some of the men standing back to go after him.  
Hamada heard the footsteps of the carnivore and he barely had the time to turn around that he saw that Boomer was almost on him.

In one movement, the captain of the guards unsheathed his sabre, turned, stepped backwards to avoid the charge and struck the metriacanthosaur's snout, slashing it. Bommer let out a furious roar but he did not stop and instead, he accelerated to escape, running southward with some of the guards running after him.

X

Brunet was running among the trees, searching for Philippe. He was resentful towards the animals that had beheaded Glenmore and to avenge his comrade and friend, the Frenchman had decided to chase him down.

When he heard thickets moving a few meters from him at the top of a slope, Brunet turned towards them and saw that there was a big animal hidden in them. For him, there was no doubt. It was the subadult metriacanthosaur.

" _Philippe! Je sais où tu te caches! Viens-ici que je te butes, enculé!"_ He shouted angrily.

Philippe, who still had the two arrows stuck in his body, emerged from the bushes, snarling at the guard. The latter looked at the animal that was dominating him and pointed his shotgun at it.

" _Allez approches, saleté! Ton daron ne pourra pas t'aider cette fois-ci."  
_  
The metriacanthosaur advanced towards Brunet, cautiously moving down the slope.  
Against all odds, Brunet didn't shoot and let the animal approach.

At the moment when the latter was about to rush toward the guard, he had severe coughing fit and, by listening to his hoarse breath, Brunet noticed that Philippe was beginning to have serious breathing issues. The dinosaur had another fit of coughing and he lowered his head to the ground, his mouth wide open while his neck was shivering. He threw up.  
Brunet knew very well what was happening.  
In missions where they had to kill animals, the rangers of the Grey Guard coated the tips of their arrows with a neurotoxin derived from the venom of Blue-ringed octopus, also known as _Hapalochlaena maculosa_ , a cephalopod from the Australian coasts, and the symptoms observed in the metriacanthosaur were the same as those of people bitten by this octopus. Without an antidote, the individual dies in a matter of minutes _._ Thus, having seen Darbinian's arrows hit Philippe during the skirmish, Brunet had anticipated that the neurotoxic would take effect soon enough and he intended to kill the metriacanthosaur while he was bothered by the symptoms.  
But at this moment, Brunet had neglected two important factors: weather and topography.

The ground on which the carnosaur was moving had been made slippery by the rain and at each step, clods of earth ran down the slope towards Brunet.  
When his eyes rolled backwards, the dinosaur seemed to lose control of his motor functions and hurtled down the slope, threatening to collide with Brunet.  
The latter widened his eyes and, knowing that the collision was inevitable, swore:

 _"Et merde!"  
_  
When the metiacanthosaur reached the base of the slope, he collapsed forward and the top of his body crashed on Brunet who lost his shotgun. The guard fell back and gasped when the dinosaur's neck flattened him against the ground and, landing in its turn, his head splashed Brunet's face with mud. It had ended up just a few centimeters from Brunet's head and terrified, the Frenchman tried to push it violently, in vain, to pull himself out of under the predator.  
However, the latter wasn't trying to bite him and had kept his head up while death rattle came out of his mouth. What frightened Brunet was the fact that the dinosaur's body was shaking, his claws digging the ground and his jaws snapping in the air.

Not being able to reach his rifle, Brunet grabbed the pommel of his sabre with his fingertips and pulled it from the scabbard.  
He gripped the handle firmly and sank the blade right into the dinosaur's heart.  
The metriacanthosaurus stopped trembling, his limbs froze and his rattle stopped. Then his head went slowly to lay on the ground, to never rise again.  
Still under the effect of adrenaline, Brunet breathed loudly and laid there for a few moments before deciding to get up.

As he was pulling himself out, Brunet saw Verplancke and some others arrive at the scene.

" _Oufti! Il a failli vous avoir mon lieutenant,"_ Verplancke said, speaking to Brunet in French.

" _Ah, Luc!"_ Brunet said with relief. " _Soyez gentil et aidez-moi à me relever_." Verplancke came to Brunet and took his arm to lift him up while another guard was making sure that Philippe was indeed dead.

They returned to the stream soon after and found the rest of the company there.  
Fortunately, no guards were killed in the skirmish and thanks to their protections, the few wounds that the metiacanthosaurs had inflicted on them were not fatal, consisting only of scratches and bruises. While the wounds were healed, some covered McKormick's body with a cloak and carefully placed him under a hollow stump nearby, in order to shelter it from most of the scavengers until they sent someone retrieve it later.

Brunet went to Hamada, who was sitting on a rock and cleaning his blade.

"What about Boomer?" He asked.

"He will live," Hamada replied without looking up from his sabre. "He's a tough one. We could have pursue him if there wasn't more urgent matters."

Hamada put the sabre in his scabbard and got up. He and Brunet gathered the men, and the company continued its march upstream.

Suddenly one of the guards at the front of the group stopped to point a muddy area along the bank on their left.

"Shoes tracks over here!" He said. "Including those of children."

"The passengers!" Tian exclaimed. "We will finally know more about their whereabouts."

A part of the company moved closer to the footprints to study them.

"They must have went through the pass when it was no longer guarded by Sandros team," said the one who had found the tracks.

"How many footprints sets?"

"It seems that all of the survivors followed the stream. They should have ended up on the lake's shores and must had skirted northwards, towards the road. If luck is on our side, maybe Cole or Rössler will found them on the road and it will be over, at last."

Brunet turned to the recruits.

"Durant, Velasquez. Go ahead," he ordered.

The two recruits obeyed and began to follow the footprints, getting ahead of the rest of the company. Brunet and Drekanson closed the march.

"I'm craving for some hot chocolate," confessed the latter. "It must be this rain that chills my limbs. I would love to be back in my family chalet back in Norway, sitting by the fire while the snow falls outside."

"I totally understand. I miss snow too, as well as skiing and raclettes. It's nothing but memories of my youth now… I must admit that after all these years, I would like to go back to Haut-Doubs, where I'm from. I will have to settle down one of these days, I'm getting too old for this crap. Oh, I don't like being in the jungle by this weather and this shitty day!"

Since they had went through the pass, the storm had increased in intensity and the entire jungle seemed to vibrate under the thunderclaps. Some of those were so deafening that the guards raided their heads to look at the skies with a very worried look, as if they feared that the sky itself would fall on their heads.

Suddenly they heard a scream of terror from the head of the line. A woman's scream. Durant's.

"Tamara!" Drekanson shouted.

The whole company rushed to Durant, fearing that she had been attacked, or worse.

They were momentarily relieved when they saw her alive and standing, nestled against Velasquez and sobbing. Both had stopped at the foot of a tree and behind the latter, one could see the dark surface of a lake.

"What is it?" Hamada asked.

The company looked around, watching for any movement in the thickets. Then they looked up and when their gaze went to the branches of the tree in front of them, they froze and several held back a scream. Some even cried.  
They had found Sandros and the two remaining missing guards.

Black vultures were perched on top of them and were squabbling over their corpses, tearing skin and flesh with their sharp beaks. The mauled and bloody faces of Sandros and his two companions had frozen in expressions of terror and an eye of one of them had even been enucleated, leaving only an empty socket in which one of the vultures regularly plunged its beak.  
But the most horrible thing of this sight was the way the victims hung above the ground. They had been impaled on the branches, from the groin to the throat or the mouth and in Sandros' case, the being that had done this to them had proceeded in such a brutal manner that there was almost nothing left of Sandros' shredded neck.

"The thing that did this... It's not a dinosaur," Declared Maathai, a Kenyan hoplite.

"Let's go! They've seen too much to keep morale," Brunet whispered to Hamada.

Reluctantly, the dismayed guards left behind the remains of their comrades to the vultures and reached the lake's shores.


	55. The Dreadful Lake

"If we find her, we will make her pay," Baker said, "and bring back her head as a trophy!"

"Yeah!" Another approved. "It will adorn the entrance of the barracks!"

"Did Masrani gave us his authorization?" Darbinian asked.

"Not yet," Hamada answered.

"Well, whether he agrees or not, I'll riddle her with bullets unrestrainedly," Baker said.

"I doubt that Mr. Masrani and Dearing will appreciate..." Rahim murmured.

"It's her or us!" Baker fumed. "Screw those suits. No, fuck them!"

"The radios are on, Percy! Darbinian warned. "Shut up!"

"I know but I won't stay quiet! Do you hear me, Masrani? If ever your little pet slaughters us, I swear to come back from the afterlife to put my big c…"

Before he could finish his sentence, Hamada suddenly grabbed Baker by the arm before pushing him to the ground. Surprised, the members of the company stopped.  
Hamada stood over Baker, lying on his back, to admonish him:

"Pull yourself together, Baker! I understand that you are scared and angry but that does not excuse your words and I cannot tolerate that one of my men speak with such disrespect! As soon as this will be over, you will apologize to Mr. Masrani but for the moment, try to remain silent until the end of the mission. Do you understand?"

Baker, his elbows resting in the mud, looked ashamed.

"Understood, Captain. I am sorry,"

Hamada said nothing and turned to return at the head of the company.  
Baker got up and they resumed their walk along the lake's shores.

In width, it didn't seem to be over three hundred meters but because of the layer of mist over it, it was impossible to distinguish the opposite shores. The company wasn't unfamiliar with the place however and knew that the lake had an almost perfectly circular shape that betrayed its origin: it was a maar, a crater filled with water and which resulted from a phreatomagmatic eruption. At its deepest point, about sixty meters separated the bottom from the surface and thus, the waters were dark when the weather was cloudy and worried by that when they discovered it, the conquistadors of Diego Fernandez's expedition had named it the Dreadful Lake.

Julio Velasquez's paternal grandparents, who were Tun-Si, had told their grandson all sorts of stories about Isla Nublar when he was a child and some of them concerned the very same lake he was walking by.  
According to a legend of their people, there was once a village in what is now the bottom of the lake. Enamoured by one of the village's women, a spirit known for his wrongdoings and slyness transformed each night into a handsome man in order to attempt to seduce the beauty at the nocturnal parties by offering her gifts, but each time they were refused. Sad, he sat on a rock and wept for a long time but his tears flowed so abundantly that they eventually flooded the village, and believing he had drowned the woman he loved, he let himself wither and he faded from the world.  
The Spaniards had their own version of the legend but according to them, it was God that flooded the village to punish its inhabitants for their loose morals. But San Fernandez's settlers may have behaved for the most past accordingly to the Catholic rigor of the sixteenth century, it didn't saved from the wrath of Mount Sibo, that the Tun-Si saw as a god after the destruction of the colony.

At the head of the line, Brunet and Darbinian were walking side by side and scanning their surroundings. On the western side of the lake, the shore was narrow and bordered by steep slopes.

 _A perfect place for an ambush_ , he thought.

"I don't like the current circumstances. They reminds me too much of the Battle of Lake Trasimene," he said.

Darbinian looked towards the top of the slopes, concealed by the fog, and then at the lake.

"The one where the Carthaginians, positioned in the hills and masked by the fog, had swooped on the Romans while they were advancing along the shores? One of the most famous defeat Rome had suffered. I remember having study it at the academy," she said.

"This one, yes. Let's hope that the same thing doesn't happen to us."

They quickly arrived at a point where the shore stopped, letting the water lapping the base of the slopes, and the guards had to progress in the water. Sometimes, the smallest guards had water up to the lower abdomen and in order to not wet their weapons, they held them over their heads.

After a rock so big that it masked the view, the shore reappeared and widened. The guards were glad to be able to walk again outside of water. Their pants and feet were now soaked and even their uniforms were wet and this despite the cloaks that were supposed to protect them from the rain.  
In front, the shore was interrupted in some places by shallow arms of the lake that disappeared under the trees of the bordering jungle. As for the relief, it was more subdued than earlier although it was steep enough to prevent the arms from stretching further.  
The company wondered about the way the passengers went. The lake wasn't unknown to them since the safari's road ran along the northern shore at the top of an embankment and passed next to the Devil's Chair, two large flat rocks that formed a seat facing west and that Hamada has defined as a rallying point. The guards thought that the passengers must had headed for the road in order to follow it back to the village. Thus, just as the company planned to dot, they must had walked along the first arm blocking their way and reached the embankment.

"Cole? Rössler? Do you copy?" Hamada asked in his radio.

" _Loud and clear_ ," they answered.

"What is your position?"

" _We have the Devil's Chair in sight. We are about to park_."

Hamada looked east. He saw the stone throne less than a hundred meters from where he was standing.

"Did you see someone on the road?"

" _Negative. And not a single shoe track_."

Hamada froze when he heard this answer.

 _Where did the passengers went?  
_  
"You see the creek with the cypresses further west? Meet us there."

" _Understood._ "

Hamada led the company along the arm.

They soon faced a wall of dense vegetation that made any progress difficult, whether by the banks or the arm itself whose water passed amidst a cluster of low branches. Behind, the arm widened a little and ended up being a creek bordered by cypresses, stretching at the base of the embankment.  
One of the guards noticed that in the middle of the green curtain, a medium-sized animal or a person had made its way towards the embankment. He pointed the narrow path to his comrades and they all headed towards it. Some unsheathed their sabres and began to widen it by cutting any vegetation that would prevent them from advancing properly.

Once the creek was no more than a dozen meters away from them, Turner, who was at the front of the line cutting branches, suddenly froze and behind him, Darbinian heard him gulp.  
She passed him and observed his look as he was looking straight ahead.  
His face was pale and the hand holding the sabre was shaking. Darbinian turned her head towards what he was looking at.  
Those behind them heard her swear in Russian and saw her turn her gaze away. She looked nauseous.  
With apprehension, the rest of the company bypassed Turner and once their view on the creek was clear, they were faced to a vision of horror, as worse or even more than the one of their impaled comrades earlier.

"Should we switch off the cameras?" Someone asked.

Hamada turned on his radio.

"Harriman? Is Masrani with you?"

" _Yes_ ," the technician replied.

"Let them on," Hamada told his men. "I know that what is in front of us is hard to look at but he must see what the I. rex has done," he said to their liaison technician. "This will help him make a decision."

The passengers were there, floating in the water of the creek stained with their blood or lying on the bank between the cypresses' pneumatophores, impaled on them for some. Most were horribly mauled and now unrecognizable, and many had been savagely disembowelled, dismembered, or decapitated, with the missing limb or head thrown several meters away from the body.  
They were making the scavengers happy. There were Black and Turkey vultures, silently feasting, but also a troop of _Compsognathus_ and even an _Ornitholestes_ , sitting on one of the floating corpses and devouring a piece of viscera that he was holding between his long fingers. Some of the compys were squabbling with a Turkey vulture over one of the bodies, despite the fact that were was enough food for all of them.

When he saw the guards arrive, the _Ornitholestes_ raised his head, let out a little barely audible cry and fled, leaping from one floating body to the other until he reached the bank and disappeared in the nearby thickets.  
In order to drive away the other scavengers, Brunet ran towards them and made big gestures with his arms.

"Get off! Get off, you nasty animals!" He shouted.

Whereas the vultures took off all at the same time and flew towards the stormy sky, the _Compsognathus_ did not interrupt their feast and the guards had to yell and threw stones in their direction to chase them away and yet, some of the compys dared to answer with angry hisses before scampering.

Once the scavengers were dispersed, Hamada looked at the bodies and ordered:

"Try to identify them and find traces of eventual survivors."

With pale and nauseous faces, the members of the company complied, looking in horror at the other side of the creek, where the Indominus had made an opening in the vegetation. Hamada saw it and ordered to Rahim and two others to follow her tracks and find out about her whereabouts.

"Poor souls..." Drekanson said in a low, shocked voice while they walked between the corpses, seeing here and there the large tridactyl footprints of the Indominus, stuck in the mud and filled with water.

"The last time I saw such a butchery, it was in Rwanda in 1994. All the inhabitants of a village chopped with machetes…" Brunet told them.

" _It was in Afghanistan for me_ ," Laurence added on the radio as she was following their progress through the footage of their helmet cameras, " _A Predator strike had mowed down a whole group of civilians. An unfortunate error according to the US command._ "

Drekanson knelt beside the remains of a tall man of which remained only the legs and a part of the pelvis. He searched the pockets of the victim's pants and took out a Danish passport, which he opened.  
He read the name.

"I have a Sven Jorgensen here."

Some meters ahead, standing in the creek, Hamada returned one of the floating body, the one of a brown-skinned woman, and finding neither passport nor identity card in her pockets, he thought it had to slip out of her pockets and sink.  
A few moments later, he retrieved a British passport, all soaked and stained with red.

"Jemma Thomson," he read.

"Kenneth Thomson on my side. Probably her husband," Verplancke said, standing among the pneumatophores next to a body impaled on them.

"Chris Elliot," Brunet shouted from the base of the embankment as he was standing over a curly head.

The young man lying on his stomach in front of Brunet had a gaping bloody hole in the back of his skull and turning the body on his back, the Frenchman saw another one between the two eyes above a face frozen in horror.  
Brunet noticed the dirt under the fingernails and on the fingertips of Chris. He had tried to climb the embankment before a claw pierced his skull.  
Brunet scanned the place, going from the opening to the creek and finally to the embankment enclosing it. At its top, Cole, Rössler and their respective teams were about to climb down to join them.

The whole place formed a trap from which it was difficult to escape, and of which the I. rex had taken advantage. Hidden behind the trees, she must had wait for the passengers and only swooped on them while they were standing at the base of the embankment and wondering how they could climb it with this rain, and before they could react, she was among them, slaughtering several in the same time and paralyzing with terror those who were still standing.

" _Dios_ ... he's still alive ..." he suddenly heard one of the guards mutter.

Not far from the opening, Brunet saw two of his men and Hamada standing a few steps behind Bellamy, whose back was facing him. She had knelt by a small body lying on its back, the one of a child.  
Although he could not see the head and most of the body because of her, he noticed that the child's feet were moving.  
As he and the rest of the company walked closer to the scene, one of the two guards turned and told them to not advance further.  
When Brunet asked him why, he answered in a whisper that was heard by all:

"The compys have eaten his face..."

Out of respect for the wounded, the guards turned off their helmet cameras and became silent.  
Suddenly the child, the son of Jemma and Kenneth Thomson actually, began to speak:

"It hurts me… everywhere…," he said in a plaintive voice. "Where is… my mom and… and my dad?"

"You will soon meet again but now, try to not move. Close your eyes and relax, we will soon take you to the hospital," Bellamy said to him in a sweet and kind voice.

The boy did what she asked him to do, and Bellamy began to sing a lullaby, the same with which her mother once rocked her and with which she had rocked her own children.  
When she hummed the first chorus, she gently took the child in her arms to rock him in a very maternal way.

A little behind, the recruits watched her with fascination since they had never seen Sergeant Bellamy under that light.  
But a few moments later, this fascination turned into horror when they saw her slowly draw her dagger with her free hand.

Realizing that she intended to kill the boy, Durant wanted to throw herself on Bellamy to prevent her to do this but Hamada stretched his arm just in front of her and stopped her. She wanted to scream but he put his hand on her mouth and ordered her to talk with a lower voice once he took her aside.

"He needs medicine… Captain, stop her! She is going to kill this boy," she implored.

"You haven't seen his face, Durant. He is beyond healing," He said. "His parents had been savagely killed in front of him. Even if he survives transportation to the hospital and the operations, the physical and psychological consequences would be so severe that he will no longer be able to have a normal life."

"And you can bet that he would have taken his own life as soon as despair and pain would have make him do it," Brunet added.

"You are a cruel man, lieutenant. What if you showed a little mercy?" Durant retorted.

"What's the cruellest thing? Let him suffer like this, for an illusory hope of recovery, or to relieve him of all this pain and allow him to be with his parents in the afterlife? The second solutions seems to be the closest thing to the concept of mercy actually!" Brunet replied sharply, cut to the quick by her accusation.

"Believe me, death will be a deliverance for him," Hamada added.

Durant looked at the whole company to observe their reactions.  
None seemed to want to intervene and they seemed to agree with both officers. Only her three fellow recruits showed doubt.

Meanwhile, Bellamy had already positioned the dagger under the left armpit of the boy and was ready to sink it straight into his heart.

"If ever one of us should suffer such a gruesome fate, you will have to do the same to him or her," Hamada said to the four recruits.

Judging by their look, they were terrified by this idea.

"I would be unable, I'm afraid..." Velasquez confessed.

"You must be ready to do this," their captain insisted.

Hamada, Brunet, and the recruits turned their eyes to Bellamy. She was still humming but she was now holding the child a little tighter than before. She rose her eyes towards the sky.

"Forgive me," she said in a shaky voice.

Her grip closed around the handle of the dagger, and in a swift move, the blade disappeared in the boy's side. He let out a short rattle before his skinned arms relaxed and fell on the ground.

Bellamy, who had stopped humming at the very moment when she had stabbed the boy, pulled the dagger to put it aside, gently laid the lifeless body and stood up, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

"We counted the victims," one of the guards told Hamada. "He was the only survivor," he added, pointing at the boy.

"First the worker, then Sandros team, and now these poor people ..." Hamada went over, upset. "This must end!"

He looked at the faces of his subordinates and saw their morale was very low and that just like him, they seemed to be angry at themselves for not finding and saving the missing visitors in time.  
Finding the impaled bodies of Sandros and his two companions had been hard for them but the sight of all of these bodies and the fact they had to put an end to the sufferings of a child had been the coup de grâce. If they suddenly met the Indominus in these dark woods, Hamada would not have been surprised if some of the men threw their weapons and ran to climb the trees or hide in holes.

"Once all of this will be over, I think I'll leave the Guard and return to Idaho to slap fines and settle supermarket fights. Everything is giving me the creeps here," he heard Durant confess to one of her comrades.

Hamada was drawn from his thoughts by a radio call from Harriman.

" _Captain? Masrani wants to talk with you_."

"Put him on."

He heard the technician pass the microphone to Masrani.

"I am listening, sir," Hamada said when the park owner was ready.

" _Katashi. First of all, I have to tell you that I am sorry for all the guards who were killed. I saw the footage of the bodies… An unspeakable atrocity… As you said, it must end. Therefore, I…_ "

Masrani paused momentarily.

" _I authorise you to kill the Indominus,"_ he finally said _. "Good luck, you will need it. May all of you return safe and sound_."

"Thank you," Hamada replied.

Another voice talked in the microphone, Hoskins'.

" _Captain Hamada? If you ever want the help of the Slayers, ask me. They could be here in less than an hour and a half._ "

Listening to the conservation, like all those near Hamada, Tian saw him exchange a certain look with Bellamy and Brunet. The three of them were strongly apprehensive about collaborating with those _Slayers_ and didn't seemed to be pleased by Hoskins' proposition.

Hamada declined:

"Thank you for this offer, Victor, but it's between her and us."

" _As you wish_ ," Hoskins said with a hint of disappointment in his voice. " _Farewell. Hoskins over._ "

The radio became silent and Hamada turned it off.

He was about to head towards the opening when suddenly, he heard a light, electronic humming amidst the sound of rain and thunder. Hamada looked at the thickets around the creek, on the lookout for the slightest movement.  
Suddenly, an object fell in the mud behind him.

It was about thirty centimetres long, tubular in shape and made of a light grey metal. Near one of its extremities, a red diode was flickering.  
By looking at it very briefly, Hamada noticed that the diode was flickering faster and faster.  
At the moment, he thought it was a bomb but he did not even had the time to scream at his men to move away that slots opened at the extremities of the device.

They realized that it was not a bomb but a container that released a reddish gas through its slots and which spread so quickly that it reached the guards before they could react.  
Instinctively, they covered their noses and eyes, fearing its effects but the smell was strong that many began to cough.  
Between coughing fits, Tian inadvertently breathed some gas and to her surprise, it didn't burn her trachea or her lungs and was just very uncomfortable for her nostrils in addition to make her retching. The gas smelled like bones and pieces of meat left to rot in the open.

"It smells like carrion!" She said, recognizing the smell.

"She's right," Brunet confirmed. "This is not a chemical weapon. We would already be on the ground if it was one."

Several of the guards exchanged dubious glances as they were unsure about the container's origin.

"There was an electronic humming in the air before it fell," Hamada told them.

"I heard it too," Verplancke said. "Do you think it is linked to the spy drone of earlier? Someone seems to have something against us."

"If he could show himself instead of submitting us to his tricks!" Brunet said with great irritation before giving a kick in the container, sending it several meters away.

X

With the wind still blowing from the west, the gas was carried towards the shores of the lake, where Rahim and his two companions stood as they had tracked the Indominus up to the edge of water.

"How long do you think she can hold her breath?" Asked Snow, a plump young British woman with squarely cut brown hairs.

"I don't know. Probably several minutes. She has some crocodile DNA after all if I remember," Replied the third member of the trio, a tall and well-built Colombian named Hector Castillo. "Or maybe she's on the other side..." he added, trying to see through the fog over the lake.

A humming passed over them and, looking up, they saw the mysterious drone that their _Farfadet_ had chased. It was coming from the west and was flying towards the middle of the lake.

"Look who's here..." Castillo said. "It's that little spy bastard who escaped us earlier."

As if it had heard the Colombian, the drone turned to face the trio and hovered over the surface of the water some twenty meters from the guards. Its camera was turned towards them.

"It's like it's not scared…" Castillo observed while showing to the drone his middle finger.

He took a few steps towards the edge and aimed at the drone.  
The latter did not seem to react.

"That miserable pile of scrap is taunting us. I'm going to shoot it like a deer," Castillo declared. "It's going to be funny when its owner will have to retrieve it at the bottom of the lake."

He put one foot in the water, then the other.

"Hector! Get out of the water!" Snow snapped in an alarmed tone. "She can be anywhere."

"The tracks led out of the lake and not in," he retorted. "She is elsewhere. I won't be long anyway."

He adjusted his aim and seeing that it wasn't optimal, Castillo moved further into the water until it reached his belly but as he took another step forward, his foot sank suddenly in the mud.  
He tried to pull it out but even if he struggled, nothing helped. He was stuck and noticing that, his two companions came to him.

"You fookin' moron! Because of you, she can guzzle us at any time!" Snow yelled at him.

"Get me out of this, will you?"

While they helped Castillo pull his leg out of the mud, Rahim could not help but to look apprehensively at the lake, whose surface was only disturbed by the ripples created by the impact of the raindrops.

"Ah! That's it," Castillo said once his leg was free.

He gave the drone a hateful look and turned away, grumbling in frustration.

But as Rahim and Snow had almost returned to the shore, Castillo felt something long and fleshy suddenly coil around his leg before slashing his calf, making him fell with a scream.

They turned around quickly and noticed that blood was spreading around his leg. They rushed to help him but when they tried to pull him towards the shore, they realized that the thing that had grabbed his leg was pulling it with more strength than they did.  
When they saw bubbles coming in abundance to the surface half a dozen meters of them, they knew which creature was hidden in the lake and panic seized them.

Rahim wanted to draw his sabre to strike the Indominus' tongue but he hesitated. The water was so cloudy that he could have hurt Castillo by striking randomly and to this, he would have to let Snow hold Castillo alone.  
They struggled with all their available strength but the Indominus' tongue was a powerful muscle and it took their comrade, pulling him underwater while he screamed in terror.

Powerless, Rahim and Snow had to decide to abandon him and they rushed to the shore and screamed for help.  
Behind them, they heard the water boiling and then something suddenly come out of it and splashed them.  
A loud snap of jaws, a cry of pain from Snow, and the sound of bones being crushed succinctly reached Rahim's ears.  
The Indominus threw Snow's lifeless body away and let out a loud, muffled rumble that made Rahim jump and stop on the shore. Shaking uncontrollably, he turned around and saw the mud-covered dinosaur straightening up while being illuminated by the light of a thunderbolt that had set ablaze the sky above the lake.

When his gaze met the one of the beast, he froze, petrified by terror but also captivated by the eyes that fixed him.  
Just like some carnivorous dinosaurs such as _Tyrannosaurus_ , _Carnotaurus_ , or birds of prey, the eyes of the Indominus faced forward, allowing her to have a good binocular vision and thus, to be able to accurately estimate distances.  
But it wasn't this that had caught Rahim's eyes, although it allowed an exchange of gazes between the two.  
Anyone who had seen the eyes of the Indominus had been struck by the fact that they were of different colours: While the left eye was blood red, the right one was emerald green.  
At the moment, Rahim thought they were rather bewitching and he did not see the claw that fell upon him.

At first, he felt a searing pain in his neck, then he saw the sky swirling before his head hit the ground. Surprisingly, the impact did not hurt, he wasn't feeling any pain any more but at the same moment, his mind realized the horror of the situation.

Before his sight darkened, Rahim had one last vision : the one of his own body, beheaded, collapsing at the feet of the great white dinosaur that was heading towards the jungle while still above the lake, the drone was watching the scene attentively.


	56. Ambush

When the bulk of the company ran to the scene soon after, they were horrified by not only the presence of the mauled bodies of Rahim and Snow but also by the fact that the tracks of the Indominus vanished in the jungle.  
She was gone, again.

"Get ready to leave! We return to the base," Hamada commanded an alarmed tone. "We need more lethal weapons."

Brunet tasked two particularly sturdy guards with carrying their fallen comrades. They put the bodies over their shoulders and Rahim's head was picked up and put in a bag.

The company then turned back, hoping to reach the road by taking the shortest route, passing through the creek and the bodies. They knew they could not all get in the jeeps brought by Cole and Rössler and therefore, Hamada had ordered Laurence to wait for them with the Pegasus in a meadow nearby, north of the road, for an extraction.

As they were moving in a line and surrounded on both sides by dense vegetation, Hamada looked around, listening for the slightest sound of a footstep, but the rain and the thunder were too loud. They could only count on their eyesight to anticipate an attack.  
Although the guards had some assault rifles, light machine gun, shotguns and venom-stained arrows, Hamada was highly doubtful about their effectiveness against the osteoderms and the thick hide of the Indominus. The only weapons able to quickly kill her, transported to the Island after a long and rough struggle with the park's management, were stored at the barracks. They just had to return there, pick them and come back to put an end to this nightmare.

"Hurry!" He said in a whisper.

The foul smell of the bodies came back to their nostrils and seeing the creek at the end of the path in addition of being pushed by their captain to double time, the guards wanted to run in order to reach their escape way fast but by doing this, one of them was accidentally pushed aside and he stumbled on a root.  
At least, anyone in his place would have thought that it was a root but by observing it more carefully, he was surprised by not only its strange look, thick and rather short, but more so by its terminal part, black in colour and smooth-looking, that stretched and narrowed to form a sharp tip.  
He realized with horror that it was not a root but a dinosaur toe. A large theropod's toe. The guard saw the other two toes on the same foot and held back a scream.  
At the same time, a lightning bolt hit a nearby tree in a blinding luminous explosion.

Brunet, who was standing a few steps from the fallen guard, suddenly froze and his face turned pale.  
During the very brief moment when the lightning bolt had illuminated the woods around the company, he thought he had seen the sinister and familiar shape of the Indominus, absolutely motionless in front of the trees. But in his vision, there was something strange and incoherent compared to how he had always seen her: her skin wasn't mostly white but a patchwork of different shades of green and brown, mimicking the undergrowth behind her.  
Brunet thought momentarily that he had hallucinated and held the oppressive air of the jungle responsible for that and as if to confirm this, the Indominus had disappeared again, like if she had been only a ghost. Then he remembered that the toe on which his subordinate had stumbled was indeed real and while his mind was confronting the different information, a small black slit appeared in the foliage several meters above the ground, the pupil of a reptilian eye fixing them without blinking.  
When a row of curved and sharp teeth appeared in the air as if by magic, Brunet did not believe his eyes.

"What is this new devilry?" He said in an absent voice.

Then finally getting a grip on himself, he shouted to warn the company of the trap in which it had just fallen:

"Ambush!"

Aware that she was detected, the Indominus revealed her presence with a growl and suddenly revealed herself by swooping on the middle of the company while her skin gradually regained its usual colours.

With a mouthful she gobbled the one who stood in front of Brunet before, while her victim was still in her mouth, give a head blow to the latter but he avoided the attack by jumping sideways.  
The company, helpless in the face of the sudden and almost supernatural nature of the attack, was now divided in two, weakening it and making it easier to neutralize.

Before they could react, the Indominus threw half of the one she had in the mouth on those at the back of the line and trampled another under her foot. She then turned to the back of the company, preyed by an unprecedented terror, but before she could charge them, those in front of the line shoot at her. They weren't expecting to manage to kill her but were trying to win some time for their comrades.

Among those at the back, Baker took action:

"Don't stay here! Through the bushes!"

But by turning to those who had caught her attention, the Indominus fell down a tree that crushed one of the guards and blocked the way of the fleeing ones led by Baker and Darbinian. Those had to make a larger detour to reach the creek, abandoning behind them the corpses of Rahim and Snow.

While the air was filled with screams, growls, snarls and gunshots, they crawled under thick bushes as fast as they could, panting out of panic and glancing through the foliage to catch a glimpse of the great whitish shape that was the Indominus, moving towards the shooters with speed and agility.

They ended up into the more open area that comprised the creek but as they came out of the bushes, they arrived just at the edge of water while the embankment was on the other side. Those in the front were almost pushed into the creek by their comrades behind and they all rushed in the water, making their way by pushing back the corpses of the visitors.

Meanwhile, the fight was raging on the edge.  
One of the shooters was already dead, impaled on a pneumatophore and they saw another of their comrades be thrown against a trunk before receiving a tail blow in the face that smashed his skull.  
Under the thickets further away, the _Compsognathus_ were chirping with excitement at the sight of the massacre, like the euphoric public of a Roman arena watching people sentenced to death being torn to shreds by lions.

"This foe is beyond us! Fallback!" Hamada shouted.

While some guards were already climbing up the slope towards the jeeps, the Indominus suddenly caught the hoplite that was holding her at bay, crushed him in her hand and threw his body towards Baker's group while they were still crossing the creek and it landed on Darbinian.  
She fell back and as she struggled with the corpse, she was stuck underwater for a few seconds, swallowing water.

When she got her head above water, vomiting some, she realized that she had been left behind by the others and she ran to catch up with them, but as she was doing this, she saw Hamada collapse on the ground, his hands holding his bloody belly.  
Bellamy rushed to help her captain but the Indominus brutally repelled her, sending her flying in the air. Her back hit a branch, she landed on the ground several meters below and her comrades saw that she wasn't moving anymore.

All the guards that had opposed her any resistance having been neutralized, the Indominus followed the fugitives and stepped on Hamada's left arm on the way.  
As he did not let out a sound, his men thought that he was dead.

"Darbinian!"

Darbinian looked up and saw Brunet at the top of the embankment.  
Without further delay, she climbed up the slope with great strides and leapt to catch the hand held out by her lieutenant.  
She caught it and he pulled her back with such strength that he threw her behind him.  
As he helped her getting up, they saw the others heading toward the two jeeps parked on the side of the road.

Cole, Rössler and two others were the fastest and therefore, they were already sitting down in the first jeep while Baker and Turner, followed by Verplancke and Tian, were heading towards the second one, leaving behind Durant, Velasquez, Drekanson and a fourth one, a Mexican named Ramirez. They stopped in their tracks, realizing that they could not get in.

"To the _Pegasus_ , quickly!" Brunet shouted to them.

As they were about to join him and Darbinian down the gentle slope on the north side of the road, they heard a tree fall.

X

The latter just fell in front of the second Jeep, preventing it from leaving and its passengers immediately went out, rushing to the woods while the Indominus emerged from the thickets on the other side, trotting after them.

With a strong head blow, she sent the car flying several meters away and after landing at the top of the slope at a good distance of the fleeing passengers, it began to roll over towards them.  
They accelerated, heading for a thick grove of bamboos below, but the jeep tumbled down the slope faster than they run. Turner, who was a little behind with Tian, realized that it was too late for them to avoid the vehicle by leaping sideways. He suddenly grabbed her by the waist and tackled her to the ground and at the very next moment, the jeep rolled over some twenty centimetres above their heads.  
Unlike them, Baker was able to move aside on time but Verplancke, who was ahead, reacted too late and the jeep crashed on him before continuing its rolls and being finally stopped by the bamboos.

Baker glanced back and saw his two other comrades getting up quickly in order to join him but looking up to the top of the slope, he saw the Indominus.  
When he saw her start to descend the slope in her turn, he let out a swear and he, Tian and Turner ran off to the bamboo, where they planned to escape the dinosaur.

They didn't dared to look behind them but could hear the soil slipping abundantly and once they had advanced a dozen meters into the grove that the dinosaur hit the first rows of bamboos at full force in a big crashing sound and shards flew up to the three guards.  
In a very short time, she was almost on them and without the bamboos through which she had to make her way, she would have already caught up with them.  
They avoided in-extremis her tongue and the trio broke up to maximize their chances, Tian and Turner on one side and Baker on the other.

Slaloming in order to avoid the attacks, they continued to the other side of the grove, but there, Baker looked around to check if his two comrades were still following but anxiety seized him even more when he noticed they had disappeared.  
Behind him, he heard the Indominus grunt furiously while the space between bamboos was shrinking as the slope was getting gentler. She soon faced a real wall of bamboos that slowed her down and allowed Baker to increase the distance between them.

Baker slipped between the last bamboos and ran straight ahead without looking back.  
On his left a little further, he saw Brunet's group and he redoubled his efforts to catch up with them.  
On his way, trunks, roots and rocks that were scattered here and there submitted him to an obstacle race, forcing him to jump over those many times or to pass underneath sometimes.  
Behind, the Indominus had just break through the bamboo wall and was making an effort to gain speed.

Two dozen meters from Baker, Brunet and the others passed under a trunk that was lying obliquely above their path and arrived in sight of the edge, located just beyond a curtain of thickets.  
On their way, they scattered some yinlong that were busy searching food among the dead leaves until then.

Baker arrived at the trunk, ran on it, jumped on the path and sprinted to catch up with his comrades.  
He saw Ramirez stop to estimate how far they were from the Indominus and hearing her getting closer, he knew that she would be on them before they could all get in the helicopter.  
A determined look appeared on his face and he grabbed his assault rifle, pointing it towards the rustling trees.

"Get out of here you fool! Get out of here! Save your skin, dammit!" Baker yelled at him.

But Ramirez did not listen and firmly held his position, waiting for their foe.  
Baker passed him and reluctantly leaving him behind, he managed to join the others as they were moving through the thickets.  
A sound of blades turning faster and faster reached them.

They saw the Pegasus in the middle of the meadow, preparing to take off.  
Next to the helicopter, stood Benedek, a lean Hungarian ranger with brown hairs, dark eyes and a thin moustache that was assigned as the on-board shooter. He was urging them to hurry.

The survivors made a last frantic race to the helicopter, running through some tall wet grass while the storm was in full swing.

"Where are Mei and Gareth?" Velasquez asked.

"I lost them!" Baker replied.

"We can't…"

Loud gunshots came out of the jungle behind them. They were almost immediately followed by furious snarls.

"Hurry up!" Brunet roared.

Reluctantly, they decided to leave behind the two missing recruits.

More gunshots were heard. Drekanson arrived first at the helicopter, but he did not get on board right away and instead helped those tailing him to climb in while the last ones arrived.

"Where are the others?" Laurence asked from her seat.

In the jungle, the gunshots were suddenly silenced. Ramirez had fallen.

"That's all that's left," Drekanson shouted. "Get us out of here!"

"Then hang on! It's gonna shake!"

When all of the other survivors had got inside the helicopter, Brunet climbed in his turn but at the same moment, the Indominus burst out of the jungle and charged at full speed towards the helicopter.

"Oh fuck!" Laurence shouted, utterly terrified.

The aircraft suddenly took off, leaving Brunet's legs hanging in the air, and began to turn as fast as possible.  
Meanwhile, the Indominus covered the distance separating it from her preys at an appalling speed.  
Brunet was pulled further inside the aircraft and his feet barely escaped the monster's jaws but the Indominus didn't intended to let them escape like that and she rammed the Pegasus with her head, destabilizing its passengers who clung to everything they could since they didn't had the time to put on their seatbelts.  
They didn't had the time either to close the door and thus, their pursuer could have very well introduce her head in the helicopter. Darbinian, who was facing the opening, realized this:

"Close the door!" She shouted in a panicked voice.

Baker being the closest to the handle, he naturally rushed to it and began to slide it, but when the door was almost closed, he froze. The Indominus' tongue had ran through his belly.  
He collapsed and before anyone could catch him, his body fell from the helicopter through the ajar door and landed on the grass below under the powerless eyes of his comrades while the Pegasus was gaining height.

Benedek closed the door and the shocked survivors collapsed in their seats.

X

Watching the helicopter escape, the Indominus let out a roar of defiance so powerful that, according to several testimonies collected later, it was heard up to the shores of the Long Lake and the Cartago River.  
Then, without paying any attention to Baker's body, she turned and disappeared in the misty jungle.

X

The _Pegasus_ , flying south to return to the barracks, passed over the Dreadful Lake.

Laurence quickly turned to see who had managed to climb on board. Not seeing Hamada among the survivors, she inquired about his fate.

"He fell," Drekanson answered.

Laurence didn't ask for more and she rather focused on piloting the aircraft, but those sitting closest to the cockpit saw through the reflection on the windshield that tears were flowing down her cheeks.  
They passed between the deserted safari village and the Central Fields.

There, the dinosaurs of the Reserve had gathered in great numbers. Many were standing at the edge of the jungle, to seek shelter from the rain if they needed to, while a few herds were still coming from the north, abandoning their territories and usual feeding grounds in the green valley of the Embrace or on the Plateau to embark on an exodus to the south.

Brunet's radio received a call.

" _Lieutenant? Do you copy, lieutenant? Rössler's here_."

"I'm getting you Rössler," Brunet replied. "Where are you?"

" _On the road_ ," the German said. " _Cole, Holmund and Maathai are with me. How many survivors on your side?_ "

"Only Leif, Nataliya, Durant and Velasquez managed to get aboard."

" _That makes..._ "

" _Sixteen dead, including Hamada and Sandros team_ ," Harriman confirmed in the radio.

The survivors stared at each other in dismay.

" _Tian and Turner are still alive. As well as Bellamy..._ " the technician told them.

A slight glimmer of hope appeared in Velasquez's eyes when he heard the news.

"We have to go back!" He begged his comrades.

"If we go back now, the I. rex will get us. Sure as Death," Drekanson told him.

"Patience is alive?" Darbinian realized. "The blow she took should have broke her spine."

" _Yes, but her life signals are weak_ ," Harriman told her.

"How long will it takes to assemble a heavily armed rescue expedition and return there?" Brunet asked.

" _More than half an hour in all cases. Maybe more because we will have to call back some of the men busy with the evacuation or the patrols. And the vehicles left at the valley's edge must be collected first._ "

"I'll bring those who will volunteer," Laurence suggested between her sniffles.

"May these efforts not be made in vain…" Brunet mumbled.

Ahead, beyond the Long Lake, the roofs of the employee village started to stand out among the jungle and the barracks being in sight further back in their valley, the _Pegasus_ began its descent.

The helicopter landed on its helipad on the roof of the main building and they climbed down of it, looking all depressed and dragging their weapons as they walked slowly towards the stairwell from which some of their colleagues that had stayed there rushed to them.  
But they barely made a few steps that sorrow overwhelmed them completely, and they wept for a long time: some standing and silent, others sitting or lying on the floor.

Brunet was standing away, motionless and looking north.  
Among everything that he had seen in the jungle, only one thing haunted him: The image of the Indominus in the undergrowth, watching them pass before attacking at the right moment. Thanks to an unknown mean, she had been able to change the colour of her skin for a time in order to blend into the jungle. Camouflage.

Nobody had told them that the Indominus had camouflage abilities and Dearing herself had once invited the officers of the Guard shortly after she was born to tell them about the extraordinary abilities of the creature.

 _So why she hadn't mentioned camouflage?  
_  
Dearing being somewhere in the Reserve with Grady according to the latest news they had received, Brunet thought of the other person deeply involved in her creation. Wu.

He had promised earlier half-jokingly that they were going to visit him. Brunet now intended to fulfil this promise and without handling him with kid gloves. It was out of the question that another guard die because this damn geneticist that looked a little like Dr. No was hiding things from them. The use of force was to be considered.

He finally turned and his colleagues saw him walking resolutely towards the stairwell, looking more angry than sad.

Laurence, sitting until then in the cockpit, sobbing with her head resting against the instrument panel, raised her head and called out to him:

"Gilbert?"

He did not answer and she got off the aircraft, walking at a quick pace to catch up with him.

"Gilbert! Where are you going?"

"Getting answers!"

Laurence did not hold him back any longer and went instead to help Drekanson pick up Durant, who was lying in a foetal position, and take her inside.

Brunet first went down to the armoury to drop his shotgun and his sabre. As he laid his weapons on table in a corner without taking the time to clean them for the moment, Darbinian arrived in her turn, sniffing, to do the same with her own.

"I'm coming with you," she said, suspecting his intentions.

As she was about to put down her dagger and her pistol, Brunet put his hand on her shoulder.

"Keep them," he told her in a low voice.

Looking at his belt, Darbinian saw that Brunet had kept his pistol.

He went fetch the keys of one of the jeeps and they passed in the garage to get in the car.

X

Watching from the mess' window their jeep heading for the entrance of the barracks, Laurence and Drekanson couldn't help but to have a concerned look on their faces, dreading what their two colleagues were about to do.


	57. Wu

_**A/N:**_

 _Thanks to Galligar and mwjchar10411 for the favs._

* * *

Henry Wu had left the control room just after the guards had found some of their comrades impaled on a tree.  
The sight of the footage had been so unbearable that he had immediately looked away. The poor technicians that had to look at these atrocious images had been so upset that one of them had rushed to the nearest bin to vomit, which made Wu want to leave hurriedly and both Hoskins and Masrani thought he had gone to the toilets.

Twenty-three years earlier, Wu had left Nublar with most of Jurassic Park employees the day of the incident and during the construction of Jurassic World, while carnivorous dinosaurs repeatedly attacked the construction sites and InGen's employees, he was working at the San Diego plant, busy in recreating new species for the park. Thus, he didn't experienced the events that happened during these times but the sight of the bodies in the tree being eaten by the vultures had brought back other terrible memories, from November 1994.

Peter Ludlow had sent an expedition to the abandoned facilities at Jurassic Park with the aim of retrieving any valuable asset, from the laboratory or the control room, as well as make an inventory of the surviving animals, determine the reasons behind the failure of the lysine solution, count the nests and collect eggs. But barely two days after their arrival, they had been attacked and hunted all over the island by the feral carnivores, including Roberta the T. rex. The expedition turned into a fiasco and lost many of its members while Wu had narrowly escaped death several times, causing shortly after post-traumatic stress disorder. He had overcame it after several years of therapy with a psychologist that Ludlow had recommended to him. Wu was still in touch with her and he even had wished her happy end of the year celebrations a few days earlier.

But there, on 2017's Christmas Eve, the nightmare had restarted, this time in the form of the Indominus which left only corpses and chaos in her wake. Even in safety in the administration building, kilometres away from the area roamed by the Indominus, Wu hadn't felt completely safe and he knew what his colleagues from Jurassic Park, chief engineer Ray Arnold and game warden Robert Muldoon, as well as John Hammond must had experienced when they had helplessly watched the park escape their control on the screens of the control room while the group that was supposed to endorse the park was outside, at the mercy of the dinosaurs. He wondered what would have happened to him if he had stayed with them. Would he have known the same terrible fate as the first two, that is to say devoured by the raptor nicknamed The Big One and her two subordinates?  
The stakes were also greater than then. There were more than twenty thousand people on the island and no longer more than a handful while the animals were even more numerous than then, and this was without mentioning that the volcano, their main source of power, was awakening. If ever factors added in the worst combination possible, then the situation could degenerate into an unprecedented disaster, surpassing even in terms of impact the ruin of San Fernandez at the end of the 16th century.

Wu had preferred not to tempt fate and instead of staying on the island any longer, he had driven straight to his house, located at Georges Cuvier Street, a hacienda similar but smaller to Dearing's one, also on Georges Cuvier Street. Now packing his bags, he intended to leave as soon as possible and take the next boat to the mainland.  
As he was putting clothes in his suitcase, someone knocked on the door. He jumped.

"Yes?"

He had no answer and whoever was standing in front of his door kept knocking.

"I'm coming!"

Wary, Wu stood up and walked to the door.

"What do you want?"

The knocks had stopped but the other side of the door was silent, like if the visitor had left. Wu took the key out of his pocked and began to slowly open the door.

When it was ajar, he saw Lieutenant Brunet and Warrant Officer Darbinian of the Grey Guard standing firmly under the porch, clothes wet and dirty, faces covered with mud, blood and sweat, and eyes looking coldly at the scientist. There could be only one reason behind their sudden coming: their comrades had just been slaughtered by his latest creation and they had come to him to extract information.  
He then feared for his safety and without losing another moment, he wanted to close the door but the foot of the Frenchman interposed itself between the shutter and the frame.  
Brunet pushed the door and entered without saying a word, followed by Darbinian.

"Back off or I call the J-SEC!" Wu threatened in a frightened voice.

"Try!" Darbinian defied him.

As he was moving backwards, towards the kitchen, Wu took his phone to dial the J-SEC but he barely lowered his gaze to look at his screen for a second that Darbinian rushed at him with the agility of a cat to grab his phone from his hands.  
Wu did not have time to react and when he could, the Russian was already searching the pockets of his jeans for the key of the house.  
He pushed her away violently but he saw that she had his key in her hand and gave up any hope of fleeing. She threw it at Brunet who closed the door behind him and then glared at the geneticist.

"Professor Wu, you're going to have a little chat with us!" He announced.

While Brunet walked toward the kitchen, Darbinian told Wu to sit down at the living room's table and sat next to him without taking her eyes off him.  
Wu noticed that although they had left their main weapons at the barracks, Darbinian still had her pistol and her dagger.  
If he could take one or the other, he might be...

"Don't try anything foolish, professor!" The Frenchman told him, as if he had guessed his thoughts.

Wu glanced behind his shoulder. He saw Brunet leaned over the automatic coffee machine on which he had placed two cups. Not only they had entered by force in his home, but they had the nerve of serving themselves coffee.

"Warrant Officer Darbinian could easily knock you down before your ass move from that chair," he added among the noise produced by the coffee maker. "But be assured, we are between civilized beings. Your nice floor should stay that way by the end of our conversation."

Wu looked at his floor. He noticed that the guards had left mud behind them.

"My floor is no longer so nice since your boots brought mud," the geneticist retorted.

"Yes indeed," Darbinian said. "Straight out of the jungle that you obviously want to keep away from you. What scares you? Moisture? Dirtiness? The beasts that crawl on the ground, run through the thickets or fly in the air? Your own creations? The chaos they inspires to you? Or all of this at the same time?"

She had noted that apart from a small potted plants a bonsai garden, Wu's home was devoid of natural elements. His garden was just a short lawn and the inside of the house was perfectly cleaned, like if the purpose had been to remove the slightest trace of dirt.  
Suddenly, Wu heard two "Plop" behind him: Brunet had just put two sugars in his coffee.

"We are just here to ask you some questions," he said as he was sitting in front of him "Of great importance but to which you just need to answer with words."

Brunet passed the sugar-free cup to Darbinian.

"Nothing complicated for a speaker like you," she added.

"What are you playing at? Good cop, bad cop?" Wu asked.

"Something like that but it's unfortunate, you have two bad cops. We are just differently bad," Darbinian replied after taking a sip of coffee. "While Lieutenant Brunet uses brute force to get what he wants, I seems to be gentler at first sight but if, by misfortune, our chat have to be prolonged under more unpleasant conditions, you will discover that I can be more insidious than him…"

She put down her cup and approached the geneticist's ear.

"And crueler too..." She whispered softly before bringing her head back in a slow snake-like movement.

"Good, first question," Brunet said. "Have you revealed to the park security, including the Grey Guard's garrison of Isla Nublar, the list of all species whose genome has been used to make the Indominus?"

"No. As I announced in an interview, I would only divulge the list in an article of the _Nature_ journal that will be released in a few months. You knew this, right?" Wu reminded them.

"Yes we knew this!" Brunet retorted sharply. "It was to see if you were going to take us for some idiots. Second question. The species that you didn't reveal, which one are they? And why did you choose them?"

Wu thought for a moment, hesitating momentarily to give them an answer.

"I guess you mean the modern ones. Well, we used Boa constrictor's, Eyelash Viper's, Giant girdled lizard's, Texas horned lizard's, Blue-eyed angle-headed lizard's, Southern rockhopper penguin's and Red-bellied woodpecker's DNAs," he listed.

Brunet put down his cup, leaned back in his chair, and looked at him with astonishment.

"As much I can see why you choose the Boa constrictor, quite a beast which can swallow large prey by spreading its jaws, or the horned lizard for the look and even the viper… but a penguin and a woodpecker ?! Is this a bad joke? How two fucking harmless and uninteresting birds were used in the design of the most dangerous animal that Man has ever known? And the girdled lizard and the angle-headed one, what are those things?"

Beside Wu, Darbinian had taken the phone to look on a search engine for pictures of the mentioned animals.

"Like the Texas horned lizard and the Eyelash viper, the Blue-eyed angle-headed lizard was chosen for purely aesthetic reasons, to make the I. rex more attractive," Wu explained. "This is also the case of the Giant girdled lizard, a species from Kwazulu-Natal whose spiny scales are remarkable."

Darbinian showed a picture of the Girdled lizard to Brunet.

"Those scales turned the Indominus' tail into a giant mace that can crush a man to a pulp…," the Frenchman noted. "Let's talk about the birds."

"The Rockhopper penguin was also partly selected to meet aesthetic requirements. You will agree that its eyes, of blood red color, have a little mean side," Wu said with a small nervous giggle.

"You said partly. What is the other reason?"

"As you must have noticed, the mouth of the I. rex is lined with thorny, rear-facing structures that help her swallow her prey. It's a legacy of the Rockhopper penguin. As for the Red-bellied woodpecker, it has, like other woodpeckers, a long tongue with a barbed end that allows it to catch insects under the bark."

"And we're the insects… What did you have in mind when you created this monster?" Darbinian asked in a disgusted tone.

"A monster? Monster is a relative term. For a canary for example, a cat is a monster. The Indominus is no more monstrous than any other predator."

"No more monstrous than any other predator?" Darbinian repeated. "Tell that to the loved ones of the forty plus people she has viciously slaughtered today!"

Wu turned pale when he heard this high number. None of his creations had been so deadly on an individual scale to his day.

"And she didn't even eat most of them," Brunet added. "She doesn't act like some normal predatory animal but more like a particularly cruel warlord. What kind of creature does that?"

"It's not uncommon that stray dogs slaughter an entire chicken flock just for "pleasure"," Wu said. "The only thing that differentiates the I. rex from the other carnivorous dinosaurs is that her species is totally artificial. I designed it from A to Z and I can certify that it's just an animal, not some kind of dragon straight out of the feverish dream of a heroic-fantasy author. Her physiology and behaviour can be fully explained by science."

"If so, how do you explain her camouflage abilities?" Darbinian asked.

"Camouflage you say? It doesn't make any sense. None of the species that I mentioned have this ability," Wu dismissed.

"We saw her changing colour. It would explain how she was able to pass the Limes without being seen, through the gate that was opened to bring back the injured worker. There is another list, isn't it? More complete and including an animal with this ability?"

"No," Wu answered immediately. "It must be an unfortunate side effect..."

Darbinian's eyes looked into his and her gaze was so intense that it destabilized Wu.

"He's lying, I'm sure of it."

"We will make him talk," Brunet said.

Scared by the two guards who had been threatening him ever since they entered into his home, Wu suddenly rose from his chair. He managed to escape Darbinian's grip but he barely had the time to cross a few meters that Brunet grabbed him to push him against a wall before squeezing the geneticist's throat with a single hand.

"I've broken men much tougher than you in the past, Professor. Don't play with me!" He warned him.

"There are other species but I cannot reveal them to you. It's an industrial secret of an American company. By revealing it to foreigners like you, I am liable to be considered as a traitor. Both in the eyes of InGen as those of my country," Wu said in a croaky voice.

He felt Brunet slightly release his grasp.

"Foreigners? But Mr. Wu, the three of us are foreigners on this soil," he said. " _Ah ces foutus amerloques! Toujours à se croire au-dessus des autres!"  
_  
Wu heard Darbinian add something in Russian on an approving tone.

"You said in the eyes of your country. How a zoo attraction that turned badly concerns the interests of the United States?" She asked him. "I'm all ears, it sounds interesting."

A jingling of keys was heard at that moment behind the door. Someone put a copy of the house's key in the keyhole and the door was slammed open, letting two J-SEC officers in.

"Release him, now!" They ordered to the two grey guards.

"Or what?" Brunet retorted without even looking at them.

"We will use force if you refuse to cooperate."

The two officers unsheathed their tasers and held them up.

"What is happening?!" Masrani's voice shouted from the street.

The Indian tycoon entered the house and was shocked to see Wu pressed against a wall by Brunet.

"Release Henry, please!" He asked the guards. "Don't force me to call Marshal Störmer so he can have you arrested."

Brunet released Wu and Darbinian walked towards the door, jostling one of the J-SEC officers' shoulder on the way.

"This discussion is not over, Professor!" She said to the geneticist before stepping out of the house.

Before following her, Brunet grabbed Wu's arm and whispered to him:

"Mr. Wu, a little advice. Beware the dragons, there are some on this island. And their fury is growing. Fear it."

Masrani watched the two guards pass by him and leave the house. One of the officers followed them to their jeep to make sure that they leave.

"Did they hurt you?" Masrani worried, putting a hand on his friend's shoulder.

"Fortunately not. But they were ready to do so," Wu replied while his hands were on his knees and he was getting his breath back.

Wu straightened up, picked up the cups on the table and walked slowly to the sink to empty their contents before starting the kettle and preparing two other cups as well as the tea bag box.

"I have things under control," Masrani said to the remaining officer. "Thank you for your intervention."

The officer took his leave and when he left the house, Masrani closed the door behind him.

After the ambush, Masrani had noticed that Wu had returned to the control room and he had gone to the toilets to see if he was not there. No one being there, he had then called the laboratories to ask its staff if they had seen him since. They had given Masrani a negative response and he had begun to worry about the geneticist.

When he had returned to the control room, he had been hailed by one of the technicians who showed him CCTV footage on his screen, coming from the Eastern Residential Area and more specifically Georges Cuvier Street. On it, they had seen a Grey Guard jeep parked in front of Henry Wu's domicile and Masrani had immediately sent the two J-SEC officers there, knowing that the guards weren't paying Wu a courtesy call.

"I suppose that I would need to be careful when I will open the door after this incident. If we have also to be wary of people on this island, we are not at the end of our troubles," Wu said.

As he was heading to the kitchen, Masrani noticed out of the corner of his eye that Wu's suitcase was open at the foot of the wardrobe.

"When did you planned to leave?"

"Originally, I wanted to leave at the end of the week but I am afraid that today's events have forced me to shorten my stay. In any case, the evacuation of the islands seems highly likely and I am of no use in tracking down the Indominus."

"You created it, Henry. I'm sure you can think of a way to stop it."

"And how? If I had been a physiologist or an ethologist, I could have done this, but I'm a geneticist Simon. My work concerning her stopped at the very moment she and her sister came into the world. When a building catches fire, its architect can't do anything about it."

"Yet, the architect is called when this happen, or at least after the fire, to see if the way the building was built or the materials used have favoured the spread of the fire or its creation. Sometimes, it happens that the architect hides secrets in his work."

Wu turned around and looked at Masrani with surprise.

"Are you insinuating that I hid things from you?"

"Not necessarily," Masrani replied, "not of your own free will at least. But if you reveal everything you know about the Indominus, like its genomic composition, it could be very useful."

"And how this will get things done? Knowing her genome is not going to stop her."

"No indeed, but the people that are tasked to stop her can be better prepared with this kind of knowledge. It is because of this lack of communication that brave men and women have fallen today. You cannot bring them back from the afterlife but by helping us, you will contribute in the saving of other lives."

"I am aware of the consequences of my actions and I try to pay for my mistakes but I regret, with all due respect, I cannot reveal this information like that."  
Wu turned around and looked around the house suspiciously.

"Within our own walls, little birds whisper into the ears of our competitors, telling them details about this place and what we do," he added. "You have seen the problems that this animal is causing. Imagine for a second that the map of her genome fall into the wrong hands. That's why I have to protect my work at all costs."

"I know this but lives are at stake!" Masrani insisted. "Nothing obliges you to show us all of your work. I just need the complete list of species."

"Very well."

Wu went back to the kitchen and reopened the same cupboard where he had taken the tea box. He pulled out another box to search its bottom and once he had finished, Masrani saw that he had a key in his hand. The geneticist walked to his desk and crouched down to open the top drawer with his key. A few seconds later, he took out a sheet and handed it to Masrani.  
He took it, read the title of the document "InGen: Genomic map of the Indominus rex ", and went directly to the list of species:

 _\- Giganotosaurus carolinii  
\- Megaraptor namunhuaiquii  
\- Carnotaurus sastrei  
\- Majungasaurus crenatissimus  
\- Proceratosaurus bradleyi  
\- Tyrannosaurus rex  
\- Eudyptes chrysocome  
\- Melanerpes carolinus  
\- Kaprosuchus saharicus  
\- Boa constrictor  
\- Bothriechis schlegelii  
\- Smaug giganteus  
\- Phrynosoma cornutum  
\- Gonocephalus liogaster_

"This list tells me something," he realized. "Didn't you sent it to me some two years ago?"

"Exactly. So you could give us your green light before we start creating embryos. It is the same list that will appear, or should have appeared in the official communiqué of the attraction's inauguration and in _Nature_ 's article. Earlier, I was forced to reveal its content to those grey guards. Luckily, it allowed me to win some time."

They returned in the living room to sit at the table.

"The technicians have looked at the footage from the only gate in the Limes that was opened when the I. rex was in Sector Seven. They did not see anything while everything is indicating that it used it to enter into the Reserve. Then the ambush confirmed our craziest fears: it is able to camouflage. I am no zoologist but is it possible that one of the species on the list have camouflage abilities of which the I. rex would have inherited?"

"They asked me the same question. I can already certify that none of the modern species mentioned can do that. Neither _Tyrannosaurus_ , _Carnotaurus_ , _Proceratosaurus_ nor _Kaprosuchus_ since we breed these species. On the other hand, we indeed possess genetic material and embryos of the three remaining prehistoric species but we never hatched individuals. We still ignore many things about them. It's not impossible for example that Majungasaurus had camouflage abilities similar to those of a chameleon since nothing in the fossil record indicates the opposite. Chromatophores don't fossilize after all…"

Wu saw that Masrani was looking at him dubiously.

"It may seems hard to conceive but what do you want, Nature is full of surprises. I learned this at my expense with this old African frog story," he said, letting out a small laugh. "The choices of the _Giganotosaurus_ , _Majungasaurus_ and _Megaraptor_ were mainly base on what we know about them from the fossil record; that is, the size for the first and the anatomical features of the other two. I would have liked that we bred some to make sure that we wouldn't have any unpleasant surprises but the given deadlines didn't allow us to do that."

"So, are you insinuating that it would be my fault?" Masrani asked in a disappointed tone. "As if it's not enough that I have the bad impression that you lead me up the garden path with your story of chameleon majungasaur..."

"I must be frank but you have your share of responsibility yes, since you absolutely wanted a totally unprecedented new attraction for the thirteen years of the park. You were willing to spare no expense but we didn't lacked means, no, we lacked time. You gave us only three years to design the Indominus, bring individuals into the world and have an adult in time for the opening of the Coliseum. Because of the limited time we had, we were forced to neglect certain security protocols and cut corners. If you wanted so much to have an artificial species, you could have started by asking us to design an herbivore or a smaller predator that would have been easier to manage but no, you asked for bigger, louder, more teeth, _cooler_ to quote your memo which summarizes this damn bill of specifications that you and Claire commanded to me. Don't be surprised by my outburst because you don't know how much it is insulting for a seasoned creator with decades of experience that a young executive comes and tell him how to do his job."

"Claire has stepped over the line today but this not about her!"

"Of course it's about her! She dramatically changed the fate of Jurassic World by embracing your delusions of grandeur instead of slowing it down and directing it towards more realistic goals. She pushed us to make of the I. rex the most formidable predator that walked the Earth and for which purpose? To fill for a time her voracious ambition. All that is happening right now is her fault. She sowed the wind, let her reap the storm!"

"Cease to take me for a fool!" Masrani retorted sharply. "I can see that you are trying to ease your conscience by persuading yourself that it's not your fault but mine and Claire's."

"All I did was filling your order. Look at you! You behave like a child who, just a few days after Christmas, no longer wants the new toy for which he has harassed his parents."

Masrani, overwhelmed by Wu's attitude, shook his head.

"What would John say if he saw you now?"

"No, what would he say if he saw you? The so-called guardian of his dream. He trusted you to take care of it and what did you do with it? You sold it! Sold it like if it was some whore sent on the public square to find some clients. Sold to every corporatist shark that passes nearby. All of this while you enrich yourself in his name and reassure the public with smooth-talker speeches. I even come to think of the real value of the will and testament that you showed me all these years before. After all, John was on the verge of death when he had it written. I'm afraid that he was no longer clear-headed at this moment."

Masrani slammed the table with the palm of his hand.

"Silence! I have had more than enough of your affronts!"

He leaned back in his chair and resumed, with a quieter but still threatening voice.

"When we will have regained control, I will summon InGen's Board of Directors to propose your dismissal," he announced.

Holding his head down, Wu took a deep breath before looking up at Masrani and giving him a challenging look.

"You want to get rid of me? The choice is yours. After all, some rival companies would fight for my services," He said. "But I'm loyal to InGen, I've always been. Propose my dismissal, I am not afraid because the board will support me."

"I remind you that it was I who saved this company," Masrani reminded him, "and I can very well complicate things for it. My empire is vast, InGen is nothing but a vassal among many others. If I acquired it, I did it only for Hammond and if I care about this park, it is only out of respect for his dream and not to make vain the efforts made by many, including myself. I doubt that the board wants InGen to be deprived of the benefits of being in Masrani Global's bosom. It will act according to his interests, even if it brings it to make some difficult sacrifices. You will be informed in good time of their decision. For the moment, I forbid you to leave the island as long as the situation with the Indominus is not settled!"

With these words, Masrani got up and leaved, slamming the door behind him and leaving Wu alone with two full cups of tea on the table.  
Wu let his head fall between his hands, shook it during a short moment and then, in a fit of anger, sent the two cups flying with a wave of his arm. The cups broke as they hit the floor and their contents spilled on the wood, raising a sigh of frustration from Wu.  
Moments later, he stood up to open the windows in order to evacuate the smell of death that the guards had brought with them.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._

 _See you next week for **Hamada** and **Survivors** tuesday and **Barracks** thursday._


	58. Hamada

Hamada was awakened by chirps. He no longer felt raindrops landing on his face and the insistent concert of frogs and cicadas had resumed while the bushes were rustling.  
When he slowly opened his eyes, he noticed that he was lying on his back and saw that between the crowns of the cypresses, the sky was still dark. As the thunder continued to rumble, Hamada knew that the storm was still over the island and that rainfall was going to resume soon.  
He was exhausted, awfully exhausted, and he only managed to lift slightly raise his head, not without difficulty, to scan the surroundings.

All around him, the scavengers had come back to feed on the bodies, visitors and guards alike. The chirps were those of _Compsognathus_ , the same ones who watched them being slaughtered. Some of them were a few meters ahead, shredding the face of one of his men while on his right, a vulture was showing him its back and had introduced its head and a part of its neck in the abdomen of one of the visitors.

He then thought of his own wounds. He remembered that one of the Indominus' claws had slashed his belly, inflicting him a pain so intense that it had make him fell on the ground and lost consciousness. His right hand was resting over the wound and when he raised it, Hamada saw that his glove was stained with blood but he was relatively relived to see that his innards weren't out. The wound seemed more superficial than he had thought but it was large and had already been infected. In the jungle, no one survived an untreated infection.

Since he didn't know when rescue would arrive, if some had been sent, he thought of seeking some shelter and was even willing to crawl if he was too weak to walk.  
He tried to lean his elbows on the damp soil but while he could use his right arm, he felt a sharp pain in the left one, mixed with a feeling of numbness in the forearm and the hand. It was such that he fell back, panting.  
Hamada looked at his left arm and was horrified to see that the forearm and the hand had been completely crushed and reduced to a shapeless mass of clothes, broken bones and bloody flesh in which were mixed the electronic components of the smartwatch.  
This was the worst thing that could have happened to him. Since his life signal was no longer detected and that the guards has seen their captain fall, he was presumed dead. If there were no other survivors in the area, he had little to no chance to be found in time by rescue. Unable to move, waiting death was his only option.

On the other side of the creek, he saw a ghost-like white bipedal creature staring at him. The size of a deer, it had a long neck with a small head ended by a beak: Spectre, the leucistic dryosaur.  
Hamada was surprised to see her in this foul place. They had not seen her follow them since their encounter on the path.

 _Why did she do it?  
_  
Because of the fatigue, his eyes closed momentarily but when he reopened them, Spectre was gone. She had disappeared without a sound and he even wondered if she had really been there.

Hamada heard a strange noise in the air, like an electronic rumble, and a shadow passed over him. He followed it with his eyes and saw a black drone, the same one that their Farfadet had chased. It was hovering over the creek and its edges, its camera pointed towards the bodies.

 _Why is it filming the bodies?  
_  
It was by thinking about the drone's camera that hope sprang to his mind.  
Touching the helmet with his right hand, he made sure that his camera seemed intact and then moved his hand in front of it so that anyone watching the camera's footage could realize that he was alive.

Suddenly, the _Compsognathus_ ceased to chirp and the scavengers around him moved aside and so did the drone which went to hover over the spot where Spectre was standing a few moments earlier.  
Then, coming from behind him, as if to announce her entrance, the I. rex let out a small warning roar, telling everything standing at the edges of the creek to back off.  
Hamada felt the ground vibrate under his back but he was too weak to react and even to straighten up.  
He heard a huge foot step on the mud behind him and the Indominus made some kind of muffled grunt. Suddenly, exhaustion defeated Katashi Hamada. His eyes rolled in their sockets, he lost consciousness, and a hot, wet and nauseating breath enveloped him.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_**

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._


	59. Survivors

Tian and Turner stood up, shivering, and cleaned their mud-covered hands and faces.  
They had spent a very rough quarter of an hour, hidden between large rocks on the hillside, below the bamboos. This hiding place wasn't ideal, but they had panicked and lost their clarity of mind. They had been lying in the cold mud for a long time, trying to regain their composure, but without being able to get the Indominus out of their minds. Of her slaughtering the platoon. Trying to catch them among the bamboo…

They did not remember very well what happened next. They only remembered that the Indominus had stopped pursuing them, to probably chase Baker instead.  
But unable to stop, they had continued to run at full speed and Turner lost his helmet during their frantic race. On the other side of the bamboo grove, a hundred and thirty meters from where Baker and then the Indominus had burst out, they had lost their balance and hurtled down the slope before ending up sitting on the ground, among the big rocks. Their first thought had been to slip between the rocks for cover and that's what they had done, panting, terrified, obsessed with the idea of escaping the dinosaur. And when, after being stuck for a moment like rats between the blocks of stone, they had managed to calm down a little, they had wondered if Baker had managed to join the Pegasus. They had seen the helicopter pass over them and when the I. rex had roared, they had covered their ears. The roar had been so defeaning, and so terrible and scary that it seemed to came from another world and belong to a mighty dragon or a kaijū. In their state of panic, the two guards had even thought seeing the trees bend and feel the earth rumble, like if the island itself had trembled before the fury of the Indominus.

After she had roared, the Indominus had taken the direction of the creek. She had avoided however to pass through the bamboos and they had only heard her footsteps on the wet ground and saw her vague whitish shape in the distance, heading towards the road. A little less than ten minutes later, they had heard her coming back but she didn't even stopped and had continued northwards. Tian and Turner didn't care about the reasons behind this and for them, the essential was that she was moving away so that they could finally get out of their uncomfortable hiding place.

Since their smartwatches were still working, the control room technicians knew they were alive and the two had agreed to return to the road and find a safe place near which they could wait for rescue.  
They started to climb the slope, heading towards the bamboos and as they crossed them, the rain, which had stopped for a dozen of minutes, fell again, twice as intense as before.

After more than five minutes of laborious progress in the grove, clinging firmly to the bamboo stems to avoid slipping, the two guards came out of the grove a stone's throw from the jeep. They expected to find Verplancke's body stretched out in front of them but to their surprise, all they saw were two large, tridactyl prints a few meters from where Verplancke was supposed to be lying. They came to the conclusion that the I. rex had returned to take away the corpse of the Belgian to and devour him further away.  
As they were about to cross the road, Turner suddenly froze and listened. He had heard noises coming from the edge of the creek and Tian also stopped.  
Listening, they managed to discern their nature and recognized voices, human voices.  
Cautious, they decided to whisper.

"Do you think it's rescue?" Turner asked.

"I wish it but I don't know, something is wrong," she replied. "They were fast, way too fast. And I don't see any vehicles…"

Turner looked at the road and noticed that his comrade was right.

"We don't know who it is so let's keep a low profile," he suggested.

Tian showed him some bushes further away, on the other side of the road, and suggested to crawl to the edge of the embankment and use them as cover. Turner approved this idea.  
They quickly crossed the road, scanning their surroundings with great suspicion, and crawled under the bushes.

From the top of the embankment, they saw six armed individuals dressed in military camouflage attire standing or walking among the bodies. Under their hoods, balaclavas were covering their faces under eye-level. They were speaking English, with a US accent for most of them while others had Hispanic ones. Some of the soldiers were wearing Ghillie suits, providing them an unparalleled camouflage in a forested environment like the jungles of Isla Nublar.  
One of them had the gas container in his hands and was looking at it.

"Who are these guys?" Tian wondered.

"No idea."

In the middle of these mysterious soldiers, Turner saw a black ball the size of a basketball flying in the air. It was the drone they had seen in the Loudwater valley and which, according to Verplancke, had perhaps dropped the gas container.

"Look. The drone," he remarked to his comrade.

Nearby, one of the soldiers was standing and still, with this head hidden by the hood of his cloak. As the drone approached, he reached out and opened the palm of his hand.  
The drone landed in the black glove of the soldier who held it for a few moments like this, observing it, before removing a memory card from it and giving it to one of his companions. While he was putting the drone in a bag, his companion inserted the card in a tablet.

"Luc was right," Tian said. "These guys don't look like amateurs."

A few seconds later, the tablet was given to the soldier that had deactivated the drone. He looked at the screen, seeming totally absorbed by what he was seeing.

"Despite its improvised nature, the test proved itself conclusive," they heard him say in his hoarse voice despite the distance. "And we have this footage to prove it. Footage of a dreadful nature rarely equalled… They will be glad to learn it and once they will receive them, then we will get a nice bonus. Our mission here is over."

Tian and Turner did not believe their ears. This man just said that the I. rex's attack was a "test".

 _What is the meaning of these words?  
_  
Then Turner made the connection between the attack, the gas and the drone. The gas having a strong smell of carrion, it had permeated their clothes and thus attracted the Indominus right on them and while she was slaughtering them, the drone had filmed the scene. The whole thing was a sinister experience set up by these mercenaries and of which they had been the guinea pigs.

 _But for which purpose? And who ordered it?  
_  
More questions came to his mind, but Tian didn't want to sit there trying to understand the whole situation while there was a risk that they would be surprised sooner or later.

"We've lingered here too long. Come on, Gareth."

As she was about to crawl back, one of the mercenaries, who had walked behind a thicket, suddenly shouted:

"This one is still alive!"

The two guards exchanged a surprised look.

"She is conscious," the mercenary added.

It was a young man, in his twenties thought Turner by hearing his voice.

"Bring her here," their leader ordered.

Two mercenaries came towards the latter, dragging a body by the arms. Tian and Turner recognized the cropped hairs and the ebony skin of the guard.

"Bellamy. We cannot leave her to these men," Tian said.

"They outnumber us," Turner reminded her. "Stealth is our only option. I'm doing alright on _Assassin's Creed_ and _Metal Gear_ but this, it's another kettle of fish. You have a plan?"

Tian's gaze was drawn to one of the closest mercenaries. He was standing near the base of the embankment near some bushes and his back was facing them.

"You see the guy down the slope whose back is facing us. We start with him. A few years ago, I was instructed to infiltrate a building, to flank some hostage takers. I'm still here to talk about it so let's be silent and follow my lead."

Tian gave a reassuring look to her comrade.

"We can do it," she added confidently.

They crawled backwards on a few meters before getting up as discreetly as possible, but as they came out of the bushes, Tian went straight into a pair of arms, those of a very tall man wearing a Ghillie outfit, and before she could leap back, the arms grabbed her.  
Turner stepped out of the bushes in his turn and with a grunt, he pulled out his sabre but another mercenary, a woman he noticed shortly after, appeared behind him and pushed him before flattening him on the ground and firmly grabbing the hand that was holding the sabre, preventing it from moving. Tian was thrown to the ground and while they were hold, a third mercenary arrived, seized their weapons and searched them for any radios, microphones and other means of transmission that he took to destroy them.  
Even if it was broken, he grabbed Tian's front camera and crushed it under his boot, but surprisingly, he didn't took their smartwatches.  
Once the search was over, they were unceremoniously lifted up and led down the embankment.

Barely a few seconds had elapsed since the mercenaries and their prisoners had disappeared in the slope that Zach and Gray appeared at a turn of the road a hundred meters away.

X

The two brothers had found the road two kilometres before and had started to follow it towards the village, pointed by a small wooden sign. All along their hike, they had remained on the lookout. A powerful and terrifying roar in the northeast had surprised them. They had also heard shortly after the sound of a helicopter in the distance, but it had quickly fainted. Whoever they were, they were already far away.

Seeing the crown of the cypresses a hundred meters ahead, Gray recognized the place.

"I remember this spot, we are close from the seat-shaped rock. There must be between four and five kilometres of road left before we reach the village."

Ahead, a tree was lying across the road but this did not worry much the boys who walked about sixty meters before seemingly reassuring noises reached their ears, those of talking men.

"Rescue!" Gray exclaimed in a small hopeful voice.

Zach froze, looking uncertain. Something was wrong in this part of the park.  
A deathly silence had fallen on the forest. The insistent song of cicadas and frogs had abruptly ceased. Only the rustling of the leaves and the lament of the wind in the foliage were perceptible amidst the thunder.  
Gray wanted to say something but Zach put a finger on his lips to silence him, then he slowly moved his head to have a look.  
But his brother rushed in the direction of the voices.

"Come on, Zach. It's final..."

Zach silenced him by placing a hand on his mouth and dragged him to the nearest trunk. He forced him to crouch behind a large buttress root. Gray protested by struggling, but Zach shook his head and stretched his arm to show him something.

He saw half a dozen armed individuals below, but their uniforms were neither those of the Grey Guard nor those of the park's security officers. They came from outside the island.  
They stood at the edge of a creek among fifteen corpses, those of grey guards but also of people more familiar to the two boys, the passengers of the truck that had been able to leave the vehicle before it fell.  
Judging by the condition of the bodies, they must have encountered a particulary vicious dinosaur that had torn them to shreds and the armed individuals had arrived after. Being separated from the group and carried downstream by the Loudwater had saved Zach's and Gray's lives.  
Going down the ridge, they saw three other persons in camouflage attire, pushing forward two guards while holding them at gunpoint.

"Let us go, you fucking bastards!" One of the captives yelled.

The two brothers thought at first that the mysterious individuals must be poachers, since the Five Deaths archipelago had known a significant poaching phenomenon in the past. But they had never heard of poaching issues on Isla Nublar.  
Did the poachers they were watching had taken advantage of the chaos induced by the escape of the metiacanthosaurs and the great white dinosaur to act without being seen? Or did they make them escape to sow confusion?  
The two guards they had captured must had surprised them in their misdeeds and they were bringing them to their accomplices to decide what they would do of them.

Zach scanned the surroundings. Over most of the portion where the road ran along the embankment's top, there was no visual obstacle that prevented the poachers to see what was going on the road and since the capture of the two guards, they seemed to be more alert.  
They would have to wait for the poachers to move before proceeding. While greatly apprehending what might happen to the two prisoners, the boys observed and listened to the scene.

X

"Boss! We have just surprised these two little dragonets (*) spying on us," announced the man who had grabbed Tian, talking to the one who had taken the drone.

The leader of the mercenaries, then staring at Bellamy's sabre, turned to them. Above his balaclava, the recruits saw two blue eyes staring at them impassively, without any apparent hatred. The man spoke in a low voice, hoarse and calm at the same time.

"You destroyed their micros and cameras?"

"Affirmative."

Tian looked at the bodies of her fallen comrades and especially the helmets. She noticed that the mercenaries had destroyed the frontal dragon sculptures on each of them to tear off the cameras hidden inside. She also saw that the bodies of Hamada and one of the passengers had disappeared. Like Verplancke, they had been taken away by the Indominus.

One of the mercenaries, broad-shouldered, a little stout and swarthy, approached the two guards to stare at them. He was carrying a club on his back and he looked at the flags on their shoulder guards.

"A limey and a chink," he remarked disdainfully. "I bet the second is a spy. Chinese only know to do that anyway since they're a sly people."

"Hey! My grandparents were born in China I recall you so watch your tongue the next time you want to show contempt for my ancestry!" One of his companions warned and Tian noticed that he was indeed of Asian ancestry.

"I wasn't talking to you, Leng," the other snapped sharply.

"Quiet!" Their leader ordered. "The next one who reveals the slightest clue about his identity or another's, I will seize his bonus," he threatened.

Bellamy was slowly regaining consciousness little and the bickering between the one named Leng and the other mercenary had awaken her.  
The two recruits noticed that she had some abrasions and sores on her face, most likely inflicted by one or several Compys which must had thought that she was dead.

"Who are you?" Turner asked the mercenaries.

"None of your business, man," one of them replied.

Bellamy's gaze crossed the one of the stout mercenary.

"You...," she growled.

He looked at her with clenched fists and grunted. The recruits would have sworn that he would have thrown himself on Bellamy if his leader had not enjoined him to stay still.  
Bellamy scanned the mercenaries and by looking at her, the two recruits saw her recognize a few of them.

"What are you doing here?" She asked them.

"Who are these people, sergeant? The black drone and the gas container belongs to them. They were talking about a test," Tian told her.

The leader of the mercenaries sighed.

"You heard too much. That's regrettable," he said. "My companions and I received some crystal clear instructions: no one must know that we are her. We all know what it means."

He paused.

"Put them on their knees," he ordered calmly.

Tian and Turner were each kneeled by two mercenaries who then held them firmly.

"Let them go! These are just recruits. They have no idea of who you can be."

"No way we leave you in their hands, sergeant," Turned protested.

"Fools! You should have thought about saving your own skins and not mine!" Bellamy scolded with bitterness.

"Perhaps they have no idea of who we are but some of your comrades might, Sergeant Bellamy," the leader of the mercenaries said. "If they ever return and tell them what they have seen and heard, it won't be long before they find our identity. To say that you just needed to stay silent and pretend not to recognize us… We would have just leave you here and with luck, rescue would have arrived a bit later to bring the three of you back to safety. You have sealed their fate, and yours as well. You can only blame yourself…"

The mercenaries pulled the two recruits' heads back to expose their throats. Their leader approached them, with Bellamy's sabre in his hand.

"Please, forgive me," he told them.

Realizing what he intended of them, the two recruits struggled fiercely and begged for mercy but it was in vain.  
The leader of the mercenaries began to murmur in Latin and came first to Turner. He slowly passed the tip of the blade over his throat, making him wince in pain, and Tian screamed.  
Those who were holding her tighten their grasp and she had to watch helplessly a trickle of blood running down from the cut created on the blade's passage.  
Once the mercenary leader was done with him, the two were holding Turner let him collapse on his side while he was choking in his own blood and desperately looked at Tian. In a last effort, he tried to reach out for her but his hand fell in the mud and his face froze.  
As their executioner approached her, Tian scanned the jungle one last time. Deep down, she even hoped that Boomer or the Indominus herself suddenly burst out of the vegetation to attack the mercenaries, distracting them and allowing Bellamy and her to escape.  
He crouched in front of her and with the most disturbing gentleness, he lifted her chin before passing the edge of his blade on her neck in a swift and precise movement. Tian let out a small cry and blood spurted from her slit throat and those who held her let her fall forward face down.

It was too much for Bellamy.  
She hit the crotch of the closest mercenary to her with a powerful elbow blow and took his dagger. She got up and rushed to the murderer of the two recruits.  
As she was about to sink the dagger between his two shoulder blades and screaming with a great fury, he abruptly turned and the blade only met his forearm, slashing it on several centimetres.  
He then tripped her and she fell on the ground.  
She tried to get up but the mercenary with the club came to strike the hand that was holding the dagger.  
Under the impact, she felt the bones of her fingers being broken into many pieces, raising her a cry of pain. Exhausted and yielding to despair, she sobbed.

The leader, holding his bloody forearm, turned to his subordinate with the club.

"I leave her to you but be quick! We're not here so you can rape her corpse. It needs to look like the work of some animal. The Compys and the vultures will finish them."

With a nod, he ordered to two of the mercenaries to raise Bellamy and maintain her on her knees. He then threw her sabre in the creek and left with rest of the mercenaries, heading for the lake's shores by taking the same path through which the guards had arrived.  
The stout mercenary walked around Bellamy, swinging his club in the air and, once he was again in front of her, he stared at her for a few moments. But in a last move of resistance, Bellamy spat in his face.  
He wiped his balaclava with the back of his hand and closed his grasp around the handle of his weapon, holding it firmly. He declared:

"An eye for an eye,"

Then he gave a blow to Bellamy's chin.  
He pushed her body back with this foot and he hit her, again and again, all over her body, smashing her bones to pieces.

X

The sound of bones being smashed ceased, and when the mercenary turned away from the body, Zach saw blood stains on his club.

He and his brother had looked away just before the guard received the first blow. They were trembling, terrified by these masked mercenaries and the killings they had just witnessed.

With the executioner mumbling in Latin, the eight others watching the scene in a religious silence and the execution itself performed with a sabre, the one of the two recruits looked like a ritual sacrifice, while the one of the sergeant was done in the most absolute and gratuitous savagery.

Overwhelmed by the horror of the scene, Gray began to sob. Zach glanced over the root to see where the bulk of the mercenaries were.

He saw them moving in a line, just below the slope at the top of which they were. The mercenaries were close enough to hear the boys if they raised their voice just one rung above murmur.  
Zach immediately put his hand on his brother's mouth to muffle the sound of his sobs. If the mercenaries caught them, he feared that they too would be murdered.  
One of the mercenaries, the one who had noticed that Bellamy was still alive, suddenly turned his head towards the top of the slope, to their hiding place.  
When Zach saw him make a few steps in their direction, he knew that the mercenary must have heard something and the young man began to think about a way-out while panic was seizing him. They could have ran to the other side of the road but the mercenary would have immediately see them leaving their hiding place and he and the rest of the troop would pursue them, hunting them down like animals. The three mercenaries that had stayed behind for the execution of the sergeant trotted to join their comrades.  
Then, he looked at his feet and saw several pieces of wood of varying length and thickness. Using only his eyes and his free hand, Zach told Gray to calm down and made him understand that they could escape but he had to be ready to go. He removed his hand from his brother's mouth and used it to grab a short but thick piece of wood that he threw with all his strength. They heard the piece of wood land in a thicket before sliding on the leaves.  
On the alert, the mercenary who had approached turned towards the origin of the noise. His companions had heard it too.

As expected, he turned away from the tree behind which they were hiding to investigate the noise. Zach took his brother by the hand they fled as fast they could, crossing the road before running in a frenzied way through the woods on the other side. At this moment, they didn't even care about the direction in which they were going, as long as it led them away from the mercenaries.

The young mercenary wanted to search the thicket but one of the members of the troop, the woman who had neutralized Turner at the top of the embankment, joined him and told him with a nod to proceed. Once they left, the _Compsognathus_ that were hidden in the nearby thickets came out of their hiding place and the vultures perched in the tallest trees jumped in the air and landed among the bodies, rushing alongside the compys to the freshly killed ones.

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) Nickname given to the recruits of the Grey Guard, by the members of the latter but also by both their allies and enemies.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_**

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._


	60. Barracks

When they returned to the barracks, Brunet and Darbinian noticed that the Pegasus had already left and they were told that like she had planned, Laurence had transported a dozen of men to where they had left the marauders.  
The two then went to the mess to see how the survivors were faring.

Most of them were there, sitting at one of the long dining tables, eating with the little appetite that sorrow could allow them to have while some of their comrades encouraged them.  
Drekanson came out of an adjacent corridor and spoke to Brunet and Darbinian:

"There is a J-SEC vehicle parked in front of our gate. Do you have an idea why?"

"They followed us..." Darbinian sighed.

Drekanson's eyes slightly widened. He knew that things had quickly became tense at Henry Wu's house.

"Don't tell me that you beat him?"

"No, but we could have," Brunet answered. "He was lucky that Masrani intervened..."

He briefly looked at them with a disapproving look.

"Helm is not going to be happy when he will learn about this…" he said under his breath. "Anyway," he said a few moments later, "I have a reassuring news… And another, less reassuring."

"Start with the second," Brunet said.

"It's about Hamada."

"What is it? He is dead," Darbinian recalled.

"Not quite…"

They followed him into the corridor from which he had arrived, to a room equipped with a radio and a large screen displaying the same real-time map as the control room and the status of the guards on mission.  
In a corner, one could saw on a video broadcast that the guards transported by the Pegasus had landed and were now walking through the jungle, heading to the vehicles.  
The guard on duty there, sitting in front of the radio, gave a tablet to Drekanson and the latter projected on the screen the footage of Hamada's helmet camera.

It showed nothing but a piece of a pink fabric, which left Brunet and Darbinian circumspect. Then Drekanson came back earlier on the recording until the moment when Hamada had moved his hand in front of the camera.

"He was alive then." Darbinian realized. "Maybe he still is. We must inform the _Pegasus_!"

"Yes, but there is a problem," Drekanson said.

He speeded up the video and only put it back to normal speed when the palate of the Indominus' mouth and the many small thorny structures that lined it appeared. A bit later, the pink fabric, a part of the tank top of the visitor that the Indominus had also picked up, came to block the camera's lens.

"When did this happened?" Brunet asked.

"A few minutes before your return. She took him, the visitor whose clothes we see, as well as Luc."

He showed them the footage of Verplancke's camera, which also showed the same monstrous palate that had taken Hamada.

"And the other news, the one that is supposed to be reassuring?" Darbinian inquired.

"Gareth, Mei and Patience are still alive and their life signs indicate that they are well, although a little stressed. We are unable however to get the footage of their cameras. I fear they might have been broken."

They saw the readings of these signs on the screen.

Suddenly, those of Turner and Tian began to show irregularities that Darbinian noted:

"Is it normal that their signs are racing?"

Helpless, they watched the peaks getting more numerous and closer on the readings, indicating that Bellamy and the recruits were under a very intense stress that accelerated their heart rate.  
They thought first that the Indominus had found them and that they were being chased but by noticing that the bodies inside the maw seemed to be relatively stable, they doubted that it was this and realized that it was another threat.  
They had seen compys near the creek and it was not impossible that the latter, having noticed that the survivors had been separated from the peloton, had started to attack them, using their numbers to overwhelm them.

It was Turner's signs that began to slow down sharply first, and then formed only small scattered peaks while those of Tian also began to show the same kind of decrease.

"No…," Darbinian said, horrified. "No!"

Bellamy's turn came.  
Her signs stopped almost immediately. For reasons unknown, her death was very quick. They knew that it couldn't be the _Compsognathus_ since those usually took some time to kill a human-sized prey and started to eat it as it was still alive.

Then the signs of Tian and Turner definitely stopped, leaving the guards in the room with a frozen expression mixing grief and anger. Suddenly, Brunet turned away from the screen to punch the opposite wall.

"Inform Erin," he ordered to the guard on radio duty once he was calmed.

Shortly thereafter, the guards on foot near the Loudwater valley found the marauders and used them to drive to the lake while the helicopter flew over them.

X

Half an hour later, the Pegasus and the marauders returned to the Barracks, bringing back the bodies and equipment of those who had fallen.  
While the dead were gathered in the gymnasium, located at the same level as the garages, one of the guards that retrieved them came to fetch Brunet.

"Lieutenant, there is something that you should see on Turner and Tian."

Brunet followed him to the gymnasium and passing between the rows of body bags, they reached the two recruits, not yet put in their respective bags. Their heads were covered with a white sheet and around them, the survivors of the platoon as wells as those who weren't on mission had gathered.  
The guard who came to fetch Brunet partially raised the sheets, up to the level of the chin, revealing numerous traces of _Compsognathus_ ' bites as well as a long cut at the throat on both of them, almost at the same place and from where they had bleed to death.

"The compys and the vultures were on them when we arrived," he recounted. "At first we thought it was Boomer that slashed their throats but there was no trace of him. Just those of the Indominus, the visitors and boots, ours."

"It wasn't Boomer," Brunet said. "He would never had let scavengers drive him away from prey. If it had been the case, if you should have seen him and not them when you arrived."

"And he was further south all that time according to his implant's data," Drekanson added.

"The worst is Bellamy. The thing that killed her proceeded in a very barbaric way…," stated Holmund, a tall blond Swedish woman in her mid-thirties.

"They weren't killed by the compys in any case," Benedek said.

"This is not the work of animals, not animal beasts. They were killed by the hand of man," Brunet declared.

All turned to him, then realized that his statement was far from unfounded and that it was even a valid assumption.  
With this discovery, they were even more disturbed than they already were.

"He is right. It's a blade that slit Mei and Gareth," Maathai confirmed.

"Who could do that?" Drekanson asked, stunned. "And why?"

"Probably the same bastards that dropped the gas on us, to attract the Indominus," Cole replied. "They didn't want to leave any witness."

"They must be already far away," Darbinian said. "If ever we caught them one day, I'll make them regret being born."

" _Lieutenant Brunet?_ " Harriman's voice called in the radio.

"Yes?"

" _I think I have found a way to find the I. rex._ "

"Tell us."

" _Verplancke's beacon is still functional and the Indominus carrying him, I think we can track down the latter. She is moving north. If she doesn't drop Verplancke's body within the hour, then you could be able to find her and save Hamada_."

Brunet thought for a short moment.

"It could work, if we hurry. Nataliya, Leif. Gather all available men in the garage."

Darbinian and Drekanson nodded and complied. Brunet looked for Laurence. She wasn't anywhere to be seen in the gymnasium.

"Where's Erin?"

"She went to the locker room I think," Durant told him.

X

Laurence was sitting alone on a bench in the deserted locker room.  
In her hands, she was holding her touch pad and the pilot was about to make a video call to Nathan, one of her two sons.  
Her family lived in the suburbs of Cairns, in north-eastern Queensland, and there, it was already seven o'clock and the morning of Christmas Day.  
Laurence hesitated for a moment to make the call, eager to let her son rest a little from Christmas Eve but she was feeling the urgent need to see him again after the events of the day.  
She faked a happy look and pressed the call button.  
A few seconds passed before Nathan answered and appeared on the screen, lying in bed while the morning light was filtered through ajar curtains. Eighteen year old, blond and tanned, it was often said that he was the very image of his mother except that he was taller than her.

" _Mum?_ " He said in a half-asleep voice.

"Hello Nathan. Merry Christmas, sweetheart."

" _Thanks, but it's seven in the morning… I'm having a bit of a hangover_ ," he complained. " _I remind you that there are sixteen hours of time difference between Costa Rica and Queensland. Why are you calling so early? Aren't you on duty?_ "

Laurence's fake happy look decomposed, and she couldn't hide her distress.

"Oh… you don't look good and if you call so early, something bad must had happened. Do you want me to wake up Dean and tell Grandpa? He is already up."

"Yes please."

Nathan stood up and went to call his brother and his grandfather.  
They arrived a few moments later and Erin greeted them and wished them a merry Christmas.

It was at this moment that Brunet arrived at the entrance of the locker room but wishing to respect the privacy of her colleague, he stayed in the corridor and waited for the end of the conversation.

Brunet had no one waiting for him back home. Whereas his mother had died shortly before his definitive return from Africa, in the late nineties, his father died a decade later and he had not even seen him since her death, after which the latter had broken off all ties with his son. Brunet had been all the more surprised when a cousin had sent him the key of his family farm through the mail, a key that Brunet always kept on him, in the bottom of a closed pocket of his fatigues.  
After the breaking of relations with his father, Brunet had never returned to Métabief, his native village, close to the French-Swiss border and located in the Jura mountains, or even in France, having lived after abroad, first in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe and then in Central America.  
The farm must have fallen into ruin since or, in the best case, be taken over by neighbours when they realized that the son of the Brunets didn't intend to return and settle in to raise cows, thinking that he wanted to forget his home and the painful memory associated to it.

In his youth, as he had just left the army for a mercenary life, Brunet was an imposing man who loved fighting, drinking, good food and wenching.  
But even though the Black Lion, so was the nickname that was given to him by his fellow mercenaries and those who hired them, had many conquests and affairs, sometimes with influential women close to his employers, he never been married, or sired children, at least not to his knowledge. However, this could be explained by his job, the risks that came with it and the enemies he had made himself over time. He didn't wanted that the latter seeks to destroy him by harming a woman or children he cherished.

Despite this, he understood Laurence's desire to talk to her loved ones after what they had experienced. He listened to the rest of the conversation.

" _What happened, Mum?"_ Dean asked _. "We're old enough, you can tell us everything. We're here for you._ "

One year older than Nathan, he had not blond but brown hairs and he was also beefier and smaller than his brother.

"I lost colleagues today and a lot of them," she revealed to them while her eyes were misting over. "Rampaging animals," she clarified.

" _We are so sorry_ ," Nathan said.

"All our condolences," Dean added.

" _By hearing and seeing you, it's like you returned from a terrible battle. I've seen this look too many times before_ ," their grandfather added.

"I can't tell you anything more but the situation is worsening hour by hour. I barely escaped death myself and I am wondering if I would be still alive at the end of this day," she said, on the brink of tearing up.

" _Nonsense_ ," her father stopped her. " _You are a Laurence, Erin. You will go through this ordeal as did our ancestor in Aboukir, my grandfather in Gallipoli and myself in Vietnam_."

"I hope you're right. I will be back for the New Year. Take care of yourself, dad," Laurence said as she wiped her eyes. "Mum loves you boys and enjoy your Christmas.  
Say hello to Emma and Cindy for me," she told her sons, giving her regards to their respective girlfriends. "I hope I didn't ruined your Christmas. I will call you back once the situation here is settled."

She ended the call and Brunet left her alone a few more moments before stepping inside the locker room.  
When she saw him come, Laurence sighed and then got up before declaring with a determined look.

"Gilbert. Let's let make that hybrid cunt pay!"

X

They both went to the garages and there, they gave a speech to the guards gathered there.

"We have the authorization. We have the weapons. And we have her location," Brunet declared. "Here's the plan."

"The Indominus is currently carrying the bodies of Katashi and Luc. However, because of Luc's beacon, we know where she is right now," Laurence carried on.

"If there is one thing that she showed us today, is that she is crazy but not reckless. She will attack a lone marauder, yes, but two marauders supported by a helicopter, she will flee believe me."

"She is very likely to abandon the bodies we she will hear us arrive and while one team will rescue Hamada, the others will chase the Indominus. Perhaps she will be able to distance us and not being seen again until a while. She may also use her camouflage abilities to deceive us but let her do as she intends, I swear you that we will find her anyway."

"Like us, she is made of flesh and blood, and like us, she is sensitive to fear."

Brunet turned to the north, looking through the wide-opened doors, towards Mount Sibo at the other end of the island.

"Because the Sibo will not remain impassive for long and when it will unleash its wrath, then even the most formidable creatures shall tremble and seek to save their skins," he continued, looking back at the gathering.

"Seeking to move away as much as possible from the volcano, the Indominus will advance south, through the central fields, a territory still unknown to her. There, she will be in the open and surrounded before being shot like the bitch she is!"

"Luck may have returned on our side for now so let's turn these marauders and the Pegasus into mobile combat platforms and let's hunt some scaly!"

The guards let out exclamations of approval and then went either to section of the armoury, locked by a padlock that Laurence opened, or to a room adjoining the garages.

From the latter, they brought two cannons and all the necessary tools to fix them on the roofs of the same two marauders that Brunet's platoon had used, and in the first, they took some sorts of steel bolts, about two and a half meters long and ended with a pointed and barbed head.

These projectiles were originally an invention of the poachers who had specialized in dinosaurs hunting in the Five Deaths and which the Guard had salvaged, using them only as a last resort because of the cruel wounds that these bolts could inflict with their tips designed to stay in the body.  
When the Guard had interrogated the weapon's designer about its capabilities, some claims that he stated that one bolt was able to hit an adult brachiosaur right in the heart or even, if it existed, kill a Boeing-sized dragon, provided of course that the shooter aims for a key body part and with the right angle.

In the armoury's annex, a Minigun and a harpoon cannon were taken and brought to the roof in order to fix them on the sides of the _Pegasus_.  
At the same time, Darbinian also entered the room to open the closet where the venom vials were stored and she and a couple of her comrades collected a certain amount of those to coat the arrows' and harpoons' heads.

While galvanizing opera pieces, including Giuseppe Verdi's _Dies Irae_ , came out of a loudspeaker, they worked for the next hour preparing the vehicles and the hunting party.

* * *

 ** _A/N :_**

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._

 _See you next week for **Anzu** and **The Old Visitor Center** on Tuesday and **A Dragon's sleep** on Thursday._


	61. Anzu

_**A/N:**_

 _Being ahead on my schedule, this chapter and **The Old Visitor Center** are published today instead of tomorrow. In addition to the publishing of **A Dragon's sleep** tomorrow instead of Thursday, next week's chapters will also be published this week. Thus, **The Ride** and **Trapped** will come Wednesday while Thursday, the three last chapters_ _of the story's first half -_ _ **The moment the earth shook** , **Hell Storks** and **Dark Clouds, Dark Wings -** will be published_.

* * *

Grady and Dearing were finishing their crossing of the plain when the storm broke out over them and rain began to fall in large drops once they reached the edge.

During the hour and a quarter that followed, they advanced under the damp foliage, in the middle of a concert of frogs, cicadas and jungle birds while neither of the two had a raincoat. Quickly, Dearing's hairs had gone wavy.  
Having, like Zach and Gray earlier, turned south-east, they reached the sloping area between the cliffs north of them and the Loudwater valley.

"The terrain is sloping…" Dearing noted. "We must be near the Loudwater valley, right?"

"Yes," Grady replied. "What was their trajectory?"

"Straight east."

Using large pieces of wood as walking sticks, they began the ascent.

During it, a thicket began to rustle a dozen of meters ahead of them on their left. A big animal stood there, watching the two humans climb the slope towards it.  
Grady had heard the rustle. Whether it was one of the escaped metriacanthosaurs or any other dinosaur, he grabbed his rifle as a precaution and told Dearing to stay behind him. They stopped, waiting for the animal to show itself.  
The latter stepped out of the thicket soon after.

Three meters long, nearly two meters tall and weighing around three hundred kilograms, it had a toothless black bill, a large bony crest at the top of its skull, long arms ended by thin and almost straight claws, powerful purplish hind legs and a very long tail that featured a wide fan of black feathers spotted with white.  
Its body was covered with orange-red feathers punctuated with white dots except on his chest, whose feathers were greenish. Its face was blue and red wattles hung under its eyes.

"A male _Anzu_. I've never seen one so close," Grady whispered.

"I think I've never seen one at all," said Dearing, "at least not in the flesh. Just pictures and videos."

A second individual, smaller, brown feathered with a red chest, emerged from the thicket in its turn, walking slowly with caution.

"And here is the female."

She stopped next to the male and watched Grady and Dearing with her chicken-like look.  
The male lowered his head and rubbed it affectionately against the neck of the female. While he gently grumbled, his mate responded by doing the same to him, letting out small cooing sounds in the process.

Dearing was looking at them with great interest, as she was enthralled by the anzus' colourful feathers and the interactions between the male and the female.

"They are gorgeous," she said in a low voice.

She wanted to move away a few centimetres from Grady in order to have a better view but in doing so, she walked on a twig.  
The male immediately raised his head and came to stand in front of the female.

Seeing that the humans were still there, he spread his arms and raised his head while arching his neck backwards before amplifying his rumbles with the black gular pouch on his throat, making it swell until it became bigger than his head.  
Dearing moved back.

"Stay behind me and keep calm. They can have quite of an attitude, like the cassowary, the most dangerous modern bird in the world. A kick and you're good for the grave!" Grady warned her.

While keeping his rifle firmly in hand, he and Dearing slowly stepped back a few meters and stay silent. Their eyes didn't leave the anzus and then, once they were at a good distance, the male's gular pouch deflated and they waited for the pair of dinosaurs to move away.

Once they were gone and far enough, Grady and Dearing then continued their climb and after the top, they went to stand under a large tree to temporarily shelter themselves from the rain.  
The foliage above them was so thick that it acted almost like a giant umbrella and only a few scattered drops fell on them. Taking advantage of this pause to drink and eat, they also took out their map to analyse the trajectory described by the coordinates sent by the control room.

"The last coordinates were next to the road that leads to the lake," Dearing pointed.

"They are even three hundred meters upstream from where we parked," Grady remarked. "To say that if they had ended up on the road earlier, they would probably be waiting for us in front of the jeep."

"I don't recall that control sent us new coordinates since we left the plain."

Grady looked at his watch.

"It's quarter past three. It's been over an hour. We will call them in the jeep."

"What are they doing?" Dearing wondered. "And no news either from the guards. They should have found the missing passengers by now. But maybe someone tried to call us but the storm was making interference or something."

"We could go back to the jeep and drive to the coordinates if you like. At this rate, I will begin to smell like a wet dog."

"And I will need to change when we will come back…"

Dearing had noticed that her soaked white clothes had almost became transparent and because of the jungle's moisture, they were sticking to her skin, making an unpleasant sensation.

"Yeah, let's go back to the jeep," she added.

About twenty minutes later, they returned to the cliffs over the Loudwater valley and the jeep.  
They got in the vehicle, settled deep in their seats and took a breather while drops dripped from their hairs to flow on their faces and clothes.  
Grady took out the radio to contact the control room.

"Vivian? You haven't called us since more than an hour and a half. Is everything alright?"

" _Excuse me, I forgot you with everything that happened in the meantime_ ," the technician quavered.

"Easy," said Grady, noting that she seemed shaken. "It's ok. What happened?"

" _It's the Guard. They found the passengers..._ "

Krill's voice stopped momentarily.

" _They're dead_ ," she told them with difficulty, " _all of them. It was horrible_." They heard her burst into tears as she recounted what she had seen and heard.

" _There was a boy… They… They…_ ," She stammered. " _They had to put an end to his sufferings… Then the I. rex came from the lake and ambushed them. The platoon suffered heavy losses…_ "

"Ok," Grady said after a gulp. "And what about Claire's nephews?"

" _Zara has new coordinates, but they went north for some unknown reason even though they were walking around the lake by the road. The sight of the bodies must had terrified them so much…_ "

Krill sent them the new coordinates, which Dearing immediately added on the map.

"Heard. We keep in touch."

Grady turned off his radio and let his back fall back against the seat. He was appalled by the news of the guards' platoon slaughter.  
He knew many of them and had invited some of them many times to his bungalow to have a beer or share a barbecue.  
Nat, Gilbert, Luc, Julio, Mei, Leif, Katashi ... Were they among the survivors or the fallen?

Although he was not crying, grief could be read on his face.  
Dearing put a hand on his arm and looked at him in the eyes.

"I'm sorry," she said with genuine compassion.

Grady said nothing and just stared silently and absently at the rain drops hitting the hood.  
After a minute, he put the key on the ignition and started the jeep.

"Let's find your nephews before they suffer the same fate," he finally said in a bitter tone.

Following the coordinates, they headed north-east, first driving on the road towards the lake before leaving it, rolling through the jungle on some distance, and then begin the crossing of the meadows on top of the plateau.  
As they had driven on a little more than half a kilometre since the edge of the Loudwater valley, they witnessed a macabre scene.

In the middle of the meadow, a young adult male apatosaur was lying on his side.  
Large black birds were perched on top of him, lowering their necks towards great red streaks on the sauropod's side, upper parts of the legs and abdomen, near which stood several small bipedal animals, all of the size of a chicken and greenish with the exception of one, as big as a border collie and grey.

When they passed by, raising curious glances from the _Compsognathus_ and the lone _Ornitholestes_ that were feasting on the large intestines partially pulled out of the apatosaur's belly through a gaping laceration. Grady noticed that the head of the sauropod had been twisted and his face frozen in a morbid expression with wide eyes and an open mouth.  
Disgusted by the state in which the Indominus had left her victim, he turned his misty eyes towards a sloping forested area in the northeast.

They continued in silence, with the sweeping of the windscreen wipers as the only sound between two thunderclaps in the middle of a drenching rain.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._


	62. The Old Visitor Center

Terrified by the barbarous act they had witnessed, Zach and Gray had run through the woods for about twenty minutes, like hunted animals that didn't dared to stop or catch their breath.  
It was not until Gray was about to faint among some tall ferns that they stopped. They nervously looked behind them, hoping to not see the sinister shadows of the mercenaries on their heels.

During their flight, the two brothers had not even paid attention to the direction they had taken and they realized that they were lost since all around them, no landmark that could have helped them to orient themselves was visible.  
The two boys had to resolve to blindly wander in the jungle while they were starving and exhausted.

When they crossed a stream about forty minutes later, they heard a dinosaur call in the distance that made them uncomfortable.

"That's what life would look like if dinosaurs didn't went extinct," Gray remarked.

"We wouldn't even be there if it was the case...," Zach said.

Shortly after, he showed his brother an embankment on their right and they climbed it in the hope that they could get their bearings with the height but when they reached the top, Zach was desperate to see that wasn't a single gap around them.  
There was only trees and more trees...

"We're lost!" He grumbled.

Frustrated, he punched the nearest trunk but despite everything, they continued to walk.

Suddenly, Zach froze in his stride, noting that the ground on which he had just set a foot did not have the same hardness as the forest's humus. It was hard, like stone, and smooth…  
Zach lowered his eyes and moving away the dead leaves with his feet, he noted that he had walked on a slate slab and by looking carefully, he saw other slabs more or less hidden in the middle of the vegetation.

"An old path..." Gray said in a low voice.

Zach looked at the path, wondering where it would led them to.

"Well, we have nothing to lose. Let's follow it. With luck, it will lead us to a landmark."

Following the slabs to the right, they stumbled soon enough on the ruins of old wooden bungalows on each side of the wide path.  
The jungle had overran them since their abandonment and of most of them, only stilts, a wall or two and rubble remained.  
The Mitchells thought that once, these bungalows were part of a whole lot, organized around one or more paths like the one they were following.

At an intersection, they walked on the remains of a multidirectional sign covered with moss.  
Gray could only read " _...raptors_ ", " _Sh..._ ", " _...mond …alow_ ".

Once they crossed the lot, the slope became steeper and steps appeared under the ferns, leading down to the edge of a large disused pool that was partially filled with the rain of the storm. At its bottom, they could see a table that was thrown from the terrace overlooking the pool. Two stairs allowed access from each opposite sides of the pool.  
The terrace was the one of a cafeteria, located inside a building with large concrete walls covered with vines and crowned with the remains of the framework of three conical roofs. The more distant one was the larger and the thatch that once covered them as well as the wooden beams that supported them had burned years before.

"I think I know where we are. This is the old Visitors Center," Gray said as they were finishing walking down the stairs.

Having seen this building on the topographic map earlier, Zach pulled the latter out of the bag.

"Don't tell me that...," he started in an alarmed tone.

He unfolded the map and found the location of the Visitor Center. Gray saw his brother's face decompose with despair.

"Shit... Look at the detour we made."

He showed their located to his brother, telling them that instead of continuing south, they had headed in the opposite direction and were now about one kilometre from the northern limit of the Reserve.

"If we had continued the safari, the guide would have made us pass by it. It was supposed to be just after the meadow where we saw the _Parasaurolophus_ eating clay," Gray remembered.

"So there is a road that pass in front of it? Let's go and once we reach it, we follow it south! We lost too much time…"

They went down by the pool and took one of the two staircases to the terrace. They passed between several tipped over chairs and tables on a carpet of dead leaves and glass shards, from the large bay window of the cafeteria.  
The two walked on a lying portholed door and entered inside the restaurant.

It was in a state just as chaotic as the terrace. The furniture had been reduced to ashes and the walls had darkened. Above the remains of a long buffet table, a mural was now illegible. A layer of dust covered the place.

"What happened here?" Zach wondered, looking at the state of the room.

He moved closer to the wall separating the restaurant from the main hall.  
There were large painting printed on transparent windows but they too had become illegible because of the soot and dust that had accumulated on the windows.  
On one of them, Zach saw traces of circular impacts, those of bullet holes.

Another tremor occurred at this moment, of an intensity similar to the one they had felt after they left the cave. Dust fell on them from interstices in the ceiling.

"It's getting more and more dangerous around here," Zach declared. "We have to hurry!"

They left the restaurant and went under a colonnade of black columns embedded with fossil replicas that supported a mezzanine and girdled a part of a large rotunda's perimeter.

As they moved towards the middle of the rotunda, covered with dead leaves and littered with bones of various sizes and remains of collapsed beams, they passed just next to one of the column and noticed that, about a meter above the ground, there was a great dried dark reddish streak on one of them.  
In the hall, shrubs had surprisingly begun to grow inside the cracks in the marble while many vines and creepers hung from the mezzanine opposite of the entrance and the remains of the roof, choking the ruins in their slow embrace.  
Aside from the whistling of the wind, the rustling of the vegetation outside, the flow of the rain and the echoes of their footsteps, the place was as silent as a graveyard.

Suddenly, this silence was broken when panicked neighing reached the boys' ears, coming from just outside the building.

"Did you heard?" Gray asked to his brother.

"Yeah."

They headed to the front door, half opened one of the panels and Zach cautiously looked outside.

Below the staircase that climbed to the door, there was a dirt track full of puddles that passed between the building and a large hollow space with such regular contours that Zach easily guessed that it was an old artificial pond.  
Another neigh was heard and the elder noticed that he was coming from the bottom of the old pond, somewhere on their left where they couldn't see the horse in distress.

Both boys pushed the panel and went out, climbing down the steps with as little noise as possible before crossing the road and heading for the horse.

It was a bay mare which, as she was grazing in the bottom of the old pond just below the edge where a coppicing of small trees was growing, had been pinned against the damp soil when one of the trees had fallen on her following the tremor.  
Zach and Gray noticed that she was saddled and that she still had her halter and wondered what had become of her rider, who would never had left the horse alone there, in the middle of this jungle and its many dangers.

Seeing them arrive, she neighed and moved more, as if to attract their attention.

"Easy, girl," Zach told her in a reassuring tone. "We'll get you out of this."

He came to her and while he gently caressed her neck to calm her, he looked at the fallen tree.  
Noting that its trunk wasn't that thick, he thought that by lifting it up, they should be able to free the horse.

"Help me lift it."

He told Gray to go to the base of the trunk so he wouldn't have to bear most of the tree's weight.

"You're ready?"

His brother nodded and with all their strength, they lifted the tree up and held it while the mare got up and moved away. She managed to get back on her legs and once she was a few meters further, they pushed the tree and dropped it further back.  
The rain stopped and a sunny spell appeared in the sky. The storm was over.  
Zach wiped his forehead and gave his brother a look full of pride and gratitude. They then walked to the mare to make sure that she wasn't injured.  
She did not move and even gave an affectionate head blow to Zach.

"She likes you," Gray noted. "I didn't know you were so good with horses."

"I worked in the riding school of dad's girlfriend's last summer. I got to knew them…"

By looking at the saddle, Zach saw the name _Rocinante_ written in black at the back of it.

"Her rider, if he or she is still alive, must be dead worried," he added. "The guards will be glad that we brought her back."

"Brought her back?" Gray repeated. "Do you intend that we ride on her?"

"Of course. At least we will have a chance to leave the Reserve alive with her."

"I hope you know how to ride."

"I took a few lessons."

Zach took the horse by her leads and make her climb a gentle slope nearby to join the road. They stopped just in front of the center's entrance to consult the map.

"This road goes straight south," he said. "If we follow it, we'll be back in less than an hour. Come on, get on first."

Zach grabbed his brother by the armpits and placed him on the front of the saddle before he put a foot in the stirrup and settle in the saddle.

"Hang on tight," he advised to him.

Gray grabbed the pommel and Zach spur their mount.

Rocinante started to trot and after Zach spurred her again, she began to gallop on the road and they quickly left the visitor center's ruins far behind them as they rode south.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_**

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._


	63. A Dragon's sleep

The coordinates of the last sensor near which Zach and Gray had passed pointing to the lot of ruined bungalows, Grady parked the jeep at the base of the ridge where the bungalows had been built some twenty-five years earlier before being abandoned without receiving for most the slightest tenant.

Using an old path that bypassed the ridge from the south, they reached the Old Visitor Centre, destroyed for the most part by a fire during the construction of Jurassic World.

"Do you think they went inside?" Dearing asked.

"Curiosity might had encouraged them."

Once they were close enough, they noticed that at the level of the tall opening in the southern wing where a tall bay window should have stood, pieces of wood and metal littered the ground under the vegetation.  
One could have believed that someone had once erected a barricade there for obscure reasons before destroying it.  
Grady and Dearing entered through this opening and reached the rotunda.

Both had seen pictures of the Center that dated back to before the 1993 incident and they knew that replicas of skeletons, one of a _Tyrannosaurus_ and another of an _Alamosaurus_ , once stood on black pedestals made of artificial rock.  
Where the latter still remained, though degraded, the skeletons had been knocked down and their bones were scattered all over the rotunda and on the staircase that led to the first storey.

The director and the keeper agreed to split up in order to find eventual traces of the boys' passage more effectively.  
While Dearing was going to go the storey, where she was less likely to have bad encounters with dinosaurs, Grady would come out of the building and look for tracks along the road.

"If you see that some rooms are too dark or look dangerous, it's not worth that you search them," Grady said. "I doubt that they went in those."

As a precaution, he also gave her the machete and as she started to cautiously climb the staircase, Grady put his backpack on the farthest pedestal from the stairs, where the alamosaur's skeleton once stood, and rifle in hand, he headed for the entrance door.  
He passed between the ajar panels and went down the stairs.

Embedded in the damp earth, he saw the boys' shoe tracks as well as those of horse's hooves.  
The former were found next to the latter, sometimes overlapping them, and less than a stone's throw away, the shoe tracks suddenly disappeared to leave only those of hooves on the road.  
By investigating them, Grady noticed that the horse had started to trot just past the spot where the boys' footprints had disappeared before galloping along the road southward. He came to the conclusion that having found one of the guards' missing horses, Dearing's nephews had naturally thought they could use it as a mount to cross the Reserve faster and with more ease.  
While he was looking at their tracks, they were riding south, either to the safari village or directly to Burroughs, and if he and Dearing were hurrying back to the jeep, they could catch up with them along the way…

Suddenly, the birds fell silent and a troop of spider monkeys jumped from the crown of the nearby trees to the roof of the Center. They ran atop of it while letting out loud hoarse calls.  
Muffled footsteps were head and listening, Grady heard a guttural growl, the one of a carnivore and a large one judging by the noise it was making as it moved in the middle of the vegetation. The Indominus.

Grady turned back and quickly climbed the stairs before rushing inside the building precipitately.  
He saw that Dearing was waiting for his return, standing behind the balustrade of the balcony that faced the entrance.

"Did you find something?" She asked.

"Hide yourself!" He whispered. "She's here!"

He disappeared under the staircase without saying anything more and Dearing then heard the footsteps in her turn.  
With no need of being persuaded, she rushed into the nearest corridor and hid behind the door frame.  
At the same moment, she heard the Indominus trampling the remains of the barricade.

Crouched behind the closest pedestal to the staircase, Grady was catching his breath but as he heard the Indominus walk on the rotunda's marble, he urged himself to make less noise and calmed down.  
He firmly hold his rifle against him and waited, hoping that Dearing had found a decent hiding place.  
He risked a careful glance towards the rotunda, in order to follow the Indominus, and by doing this, he could finally get a clear view of her.

She was slenderer than a _Tyrannosaurus_ , and her muscular body could be compared to the one of a race horse or an athlete.  
A long, muscular and flexible neck supported an enormous skull, about two meters long and one-and-a-half meters tall, which resembled those of _Abelisauridae_ in terms of general constitution and look, except that it was broader at the posterior end while the snout was longer.  
Above and ahead of the eyes, the lacrimal bone formed an outgrowth made of keratin and from it, a ridge ran along the top of the nasal bone, stopping only above the nostrils while the top of the snout was lined with small bumps. The eyes, located in the upper part of the orbit, were oriented forwards and one could notice the presence of eyelashes-like modified scales above them, giving a bit of a feminine look to the creature.  
Also above the eyes, a pair of prominent keratinous horns, a legacy of _Carnotaurus_ and forty-five centimetres long, protruded obliquely forward.  
The back of the head featured some kind of a crown, made of spiny scales similar to those found on the posterior half of the tail, but the most notable feature there was the presence of a set of six bony horns, three on each side, with the longest, of the length of a human arm, slightly above eye-level and the smallest at the level of the jaw. There were two others, of a rugose nature and inherited from _Kaprosuchus_ that projected posteriorly from the skull.

Grady was struck by the large volume of her cranium, the largest he had ever seen among the large theropods and even all non-avian dinosaurs since it was larger, proportionally speaking, to those of _Troodontidae_ , commonly considered as the most intelligent dinosaurs. In terms of brain volume, it approached those of some birds.  
He had heard a lot about the Indominus' cunningness, and knowing very well raptors, he had never doubted a single moment that some dinosaurs could be very smart but by looking at her skull, he wondered about the level of her cognitive abilities. It kindled his curiosity and frightened him at the same time. He looked at the rest of the body.

From the top of the skull, the ridge of spines that Grady had seen amidst the fog nearly seven hours earlier ran on top of the neck and back, up to the base of the tail where it disappeared behind raised scaly formations similar to those found on crocodiles' tail.  
The forelimbs were strong and very long while the hands were prehensile and had four fingers. At the astonishment of the keeper, the first finger was an opposable thumb. Some theropods such as _Bambiraptor_ and _Nqwebasaurus_ had a partially opposable finger that could perform similar functions to those of a thumb but these species weren't in the list and none of those had thumbs. It must have been a legacy of one of the modern species whose DNA's where used to make the Indominus.

The majority of the scales, especially those of the belly and the sides, were white. On the other hand, the back, the tail and the arms showed a black and white barred pattern while there was a red patch on the nape and another above the snout.  
A black area stretched from around the eyes to the corners of the lower jaw while the lips, the lower jaw, the dewlap beneath it, the throat and the upper part of the powerful chest were of a blood red colour.

Grady had expected to see a hideous and somewhat deformed animal given her nature as a genetic hybrid but the more he looked at her, the more he felt for her an appeal similar to one that quite a few people had for venomous exotic snakes that had beautiful colours.  
During his observation, he noticed that she was keeping her mouth ajar and he saw a big dark mass inside, probably preys that she intended to eat later.

The Indominus lowered the front part of the body and placed the palms of her hands on the ground.  
This surprised Grady since the same move in another large theropod would have been impossible without breaking the bones of the wrist but in her case, the hands showed enough dexterity to perform this move while the shoulder girdle had to feature the necessary adaptations.

She moved to the middle of the rotunda with her forelimbs held in straight and upright position under the body, walking like crocodiles do sometimes or like some giant terrestrial archosaurian predators of the Triassic period did, filling the air with the elegant pounding of her claws on the marble.

Seeing this horned reptilian creature with scales that formed a natural armour moving that way on her four limbs, Grady realized that Dearing didn't lied earlier: The Indominus really looked like a dragon.

When she arrived in front of the balcony, the Indominus turned towards it and approached her mouth from the balustrade. Grady then heard something slipping from her maws and curious, he cautiously looked over the pedestal.  
He then discerned three human bodies now stacked on the balcony. Two of them were wearing Grey Guard equipment.

As the Indominus stepped backwards, her nostrils suddenly widened and she sniffed for a few seconds before lowering hear head over the pedestal on her left, the same one on which Grady had left his backpack.  
He only realized then that it was still there.

The snout of the Indominus approached the bag, gently touched it and she sniffed it for a while with a significant interest.  
Grady put his hand in front of his nose to smell it and noticed that the smell of T. rex's dung was still on it despite the fact that it had been under the rain for a while.  
As he had mentioned to Dearing, the smell was going to stay for a few days but if he was able to smell it, the Indominus, with her predatory senses, must already had detected it.  
Grady turned pale once he realized this and as if to confirm his fear, her nostrils turned towards the stairs.

In the wild, when a predator smelled a rival, he would in most cases investigate the origin of the smell and in the rare situations when it felt confident enough, it would seek the rival to challenge it in order to steal its territory.  
Not intending to play cat and mouse with her as he could only be the rodent, Grady thought of a way to move away from the rotunda without being spotted but he first had to test the senses of the Indominus.  
Taking advantage of the fact that she was focused on the bag, Grady grabbed a small piece of rubble at his feet and tossed it away, towards the entrance of the restaurant.

The Indominus heard the noise and tilted her head sideways, like if it helped her to listen more carefully, in addition to hold her right front limb suspended in the air, like a dog pointing game.  
She remained a few seconds like this and then turned away from the source of the noise to instead look at the bones and pieces of beams that littered the ground at her feet.

 _It seems that she doesn't want to hunt after all_ , the keeper thought.

Using her arms, she swept away the debris, sending them behind her sometimes forcefully and once the floor in the middle of the rotunda was swept, she lay down on her right side, opened her mouth wide to yawn and put her head on the Alamosaur's skeleton's pedestal, right next to the bag. The radio and Dearing's phone were inside it.

 _Fuck!_ He swore internally.

He remained sit behind his pedestal and waited for the Indominus to sleep soundly.

X

Once a few minutes had passed since the first snoring, Dearing dared to look out of her hiding spot, towards the balcony, where the Indominus had left the bodies before starting to swipe the floor.  
Holding the back of her hand against her mouth, she looked at the three bodies stacked on top of each other and recognized two of them, Captain Hamada and Corporal Verplancke.

Suddenly, Hamada's body started to move.

"Oh God...," she said in a low voice.

As discreetly as she could, she crawled to the balcony and looked at the captain of the guards.

His left forearm had been reduced to shreds and he showed a large laceration on his abdomen.  
Despite his serious injuries, he was still alive but not knowing for how long, she thought it might be better if she took him to safety.

Thus, she continued to crawl up to them and pushed as gently as possible the bodies of Verplancke and the visitor to clear Hamada.  
Once this was done, she removed his cloak and put her arms under his armpits to drag him to the corridor where she had been hiding.  
Meanwhile, Hamada regained consciousness and when Dearing noticed this, she saw that his eyes were full of resentment towards her.  
However, he breathe with difficulty because of his breastplate and every exhalation seemed to be the last. Hamada first tried to remove it with his remaining hand but being too weak, he didn't managed to do this. He let his hand fall and let out a moan.

Dearing knelt beside him and then carefully removed his breastplate to lay it silently next to him.  
With his hand, Hamada unsheathed his dagger, grabbed it by the blade, and feebly handed it to her.  
Although this left her circumspect, she took it by the handle but as she was about to put it aside, he suddenly grabbed her arm to prevent her to do so. Dearing looked at Hamada and saw that he was giving her a begging look.

"Please...," he gasped in a rattle.

She did not immediately understand what he was asking her to do but when he pointed the blade towards his chest, horror strike her and she shook her head.

"No. No. I can't…"

With all his remaining energy, Hamada brutally closed his grip around Dearing's wrist and pulled it straight towards his chest, and before she had the time to react, she felt the dagger pass between his ribs and pierce his heart.

She was so shocked that she left the blade stuck in Hamada's body for a few seconds and when she pulled it out, the guard's moan stopped and Dearing heard his last gasp.

Horrified by what she had done, she suppressed a scream and dropped the dagger before crawling back to the wall and starting to sob.

X

Once he thought that the Indominus was sleeping soundly enough, Grady stepped aside from his hiding place. Passing under the staircase, he furtively went back to the rotunda, almost entirely occupied by the predator's body.  
At each step, he took care to avoid walking on the scattered bones and struggling against fear, the keeper approached bit by bit the head of the Indominus.  
When her legs started to make small kicks and shudder, Grady knew that she was dreaming and at the moment, she no longer seemed to be the ruthless monster, the nameless fear that had only sown terror and desolation on her wake but just an animal like every other dinosaurs of the park despite her nature, feeling the same needs as them.

Her hot breath soon reached his face and Grady froze for a second, fearing that by leaning forward, his scent would reach her nostrils, or that the slightest noise would awaken her.  
He slowly stretched his arm and gently put his hand on top of the bag, closed his fingers on it and lifted it, carefully, as if it were some golden idol whose removal from its pedestal would trigger a whole set of traps.  
Then, he stepped back, taking care to avoid the bones like before and he returned hide behind the tyrannosaur's pedestal.

There, he searched the top pocket for Dearing's phone, and when he turned on the latter, he put it on silent mode and searched in the directory for the number of Young or one of the control room's technicians.  
He found Cruthers' number and then began to write him a message:

 _Irex. Old VC. Send help! Quick!_

A notification appeared on the screen to tell him that he didn't have any signal and so he had to try to send the message from a spot where there was some.  
Holding the phone high, he moved away from the pedestal and the staircase. He noticed that he was able to have the hint of a signal that came from the middle of the rotunda, where the Indominus was sleeping.

 _Seriously? The Gods are laughing at us!  
_  
Preparing for any eventuality, he grabbed his rifle and bag and placed them just at the base of the staircase before stepping towards the centre of the rotunda until he stopped once he got enough signal.  
While he was almost pressed against the Indominus' leg, he pressed on _Send_ and a feel of relief ran through his body when a notification confirming the successful sending of the text appeared.

The Indominus' body suddenly shuddered and Grady feared that she was so sensitive to waves that sending a text message near her would wake her up.  
Instinctively, he moved back towards his bag and carefully stepped over the tail. But seeing that she continued to sleep however, Grady's relaxed a bit.

However, a new tremor occurred at this moment, intense enough for the last beams of the frame still in place to crack.  
Once it ended, Grady continued to move towards his belongings so he could climb upstairs where he would find Dearing and tell her that they have to leave through a safer exit.

At the level of the frame, a small ball of greyish fur with a long bushy tail appeared and ran on top of one the weakened beams, only stopping intermittently to look down.  
Grady saw the animal, a Variegated squirrel, also known as _Sciurus variegatoides_. Curious, the rodent wanted to get closer to better observe the human standing so close to the large predatory dinosaur asleep. What was he doing there? Why?  
But when the squirrel moved close to the end of the beam, a whole piece began to crack under its yet small weight. It turned around in a single move and ran towards the base while the piece break off from the rest, falling right towards the Indominus, much to Grady's chagrin.

 _Fool of a squirrel!  
_  
Landing on top of the Indominus' snout, the piece broke and she growled before moving her head and slowly opening her eyes.  
By doing so, she realized that something was wrong. Something had taken the bag.  
She swiftly raised her head and scanned the rotunda until she saw Grady, as straight as a ramrod and pale.

Hearing her growl and seeing her looking at him intensively and drawing her lips back, Grady did what seemed the most reasonable on the instant: Fleeing.  
He grabbed his rifle and his bag and jumped aside to avoid a tail blow before starting to climb the staircase while the Indominus rose.

As he had almost reached the top, Grady heard a viscous sound behind him and suddenly, he felt a burning sensation on his left side, making him grimace out of pain.  
Lowering his eyes to see why, he saw a red stain spreading under his T-Shirt.  
Although the Indominus' tongue had barely touched him, the tip had passed close enough to inflict a cut several centimetres long.

Once at the balcony, Grady turned right and found Dearing sitting against a wall, holding her legs against her chest and sobbing.  
Despite the proximity of the danger, she seemed unable to get up and her hands were stained with blood. A few steps from her, there was a blood-stained dagger and the lifeless body of Hamada.  
Shocked by the scene, Grady wondered what had happened but the Indominus roaring behind him reminded him of the urgency of the situation.  
With one hand, he grabbed the dagger and his machete, and with the other, he grabbed Dearing's arm to raise her quickly.  
But when she turned and saw the Indominus trying to reach them with her tongue, her arm escaped Grady and she began to run down the corridor, leaving the keeper behind while he was putting the dagger in the bag.  
As she couldn't reach them where they were running, the Indominus pull her head out of the mezzanine and turned away from the balcony.

At the end of the corridor, Dearing arrived in front of a door's panel that was standing obliquely across the doorway, blocking her way. But having seen a broken window right beside it, she leapt over it and ended up outside, on a balcony, just in front of a metal staircase that led to the roof. Grady leapt in his turn, led her around the staircase and once they were at the edge of the balcony, he grabbed her hand and they jumped.

They almost landed on their knees but hearing the Indominus walking around the building, they rushed to the northwest and passed between the pool and the ridge. But shortly afterwards, while they were running amidst a dense vegetation under some large trees, the ground suddenly collapsed beneath their feet.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._


	64. The Ride

When they saw the Dreadful Lake appear behind a curtain of trees right ahead, Zach and Gray were both relieved and worried because they indeed had just found their way back to the village but they also feared to see again the corpses.  
However the road that came down from the old Visitor Center only joined the one that bypassed the lake at the level of the Devil's Chair, east of the slaughter site.  
Thus they didn't see the latter again and soon lost sight of the lake since Rocinante was galloping fast on the sinuous road.

Remembering that the terrain was open and gently sloping between the lake and the village, Gray suggested to his brother that they leave the road a bit further and cut across the fields to return to civilization more quickly. Zach approved the idea and instead of taking the turn of the road, they encouraged Rocinante to slow down and continue straight, making her trot between the thickets and the bushes.

Below the low edges of the former volcano that was the Dreadful Lake, they saw a grassy dell.  
Leaving the dampness of the jungle behind her, Rocinante went down there and began to climb the opposite slope. Once they were near its top, Zach pulled the leads and they stopped to bitterly look one last time at the western part of the Reserve and gave the Sibo a wary look. They turned away and galloped towards the gates of the Safari Village, in the shadow of the Western Cordillera.

During the whole ride, they hadn't encountered a single dinosaur and seeing the grassy slopes north of the village deserted troubled them.  
But once they were within earshot of the village, they realized by vainly asking if there was anyone that the dinosaurs were not the only ones that had abandoned the area.

"It's deserted," Zach noted.

They then rode along the limits of the silent village, looking for a gate, and they found the cattle grid on which they had passed at the very beginning of the safari.  
This obstacle's purpose being to prevent animals from passing, including horses, they knew that there was another passage, a gate, which the mounted guards used to enter or leave the Reserve.  
The Mitchells found it further east, not far from the Giants' Grove. They could hear some bellows and calls, coming from the fields and meadows at the very centre of the island.  
The boys tried to open the gate but without a magnetic badge or a key, it remained locked and electric current being still active, trying to climb the tall electrical fence was an idea that they immediately get out of their minds, not to mention the fact that it would have implied that they abandon Rocinante in the Reserve, an ungrateful act towards the one which allowed them to reach the relative security of the village's outskirts, far enough from the area haunted by the metriacanthosaurs, the great white dinosaur or the mercenaries.  
Monitoring the gate, there were two cameras which, having detected movement on the margins of their field of view, had turned towards them shortly after they tried to open the gate.

While Rocinante, held by the leads by Gray, was grazing untroubled next to them, Zach took the map and unfolded it in front of his brother.

"Since we can't enter in the village, we must try our luck elsewhere."

He noticed that a bridge was supposed to span a gorge above the Rio Iris about a kilometre from the Lagoon's current localisation.

"You see the bridge here?" He pointed at his brother. "That's where we go now."

Zach helped his brother get back on the mare and he then walked towards one of the cameras, still holding the unfolded map in his hands. He put it in front of him and repeatedly pointed at the bridge over the gorge northwest of Burroughs, telling anyone who was watching the CCTV footage that they intended to go there.

He got back on Rocinante and they headed first northeast, towards a long forested strip, in order to bypass the Giants' Grove before leaving the jungle near the edge of a waterhole.  
However, as they were facing an opening that allowed them to see the central fields from the meadow where they had seen their first herd of dryosaurs, they heard the roar of an approaching helicopter.

The latter, of a dark green colour and bearing the five white stars of the Grey Guard, appeared shortly after, and in addition to the sound of the engines, there was also a loud music, played by a loudspeaker inside the aircraft. Zach recognized the lyrics. It was those of _Paint it Black_ by the Rolling Stones.  
It flew so close to them that Rocinante they would have lost the control of Rocinante if Zach hadn't immediately calmed her.  
Aboard the helicopter, Gray saw men of the Grey Guard, equipped from head to foot as well as, fixed to the left side, a machine gun.  
Wondering if the guards had found the white dinosaur, they watched the helicopter flew by and once Rocinante fully calmed, they rode down to the central fields but when they arrived at the very edge of the jungle, Zach suddenly pulled the leads.

Two apatosaurs appeared on their left, walking in front of a gigantic cortege that had formed during the whole beginning of the afternoon.  
The herbivores of the western part of the Reserve and the Embrace had gathered in great numbers near the base of the southern mountainous arc of the latter, making a gigantic herd where individuals of different species sometimes mixed.  
In addition to the apatosaurs, among other species, they saw a dozen of _Triceratops_ , about thirty _Parasaurolophus_ , as many _Gallimimus,_ more than twenty corythosaurs, fifteen pachycephalosaurs, some stegosaurs, a small group of therizinosaurs at the back and trotting in the middle or under for some, dryosaurs, avimimus and yinlongs in sheer numbers… In the middle and at the back, the long necks of two mamenchisaurs rose high above the other herbivores.

Stunned and on their guards at the same time, the boys let the front of the herd pass in front of them and quickly, their ears began to buzz because of the deafening concert of bellows, yelpings made by the younglings walking right next to their mothers, and calls that filled the air.  
Beyond the animals before their eyes, the Mitchells saw two Grey Guard's marauders drive north.

Like the helicopter they had seen a few minutes earlier, they were equipped with heavy weapons, consisting of cannons mounted on a rotating platform. Inside of those, there were projectiles that looked like ballista' bolts.  
They quickly deduced that these two vehicles and the helicopter belonged to a same hunting party, sent to kill the white dinosaur.  
Before they had the time to wave to the guards, the huge body of a _Parasaurolophus_ blocked their view and once the duckbill had passed, Zach and Gray noticed that the marauders were gone.  
Realizing that they couldn't ride around the back of the horde since it seemed to stretch on hundreds of meters, they trotted towards the front, passing in the middle of a narrow band between the trees and the dinosaurs.

They had almost caught up with the two apatosaurs in the front when they noticed that, at the edge of the waterhole ahead of them, the tail of an ankylosaur was dangerously swinging towards the approaching herd.  
Quenching its thirst alone and undisturbed until then, the armoured herbivore didn't wanted anything to approach it, fearing that it would be chased away from the waterhole.  
The apatosaurs understood the message and moved aside, but the ankylosaur continued its intimidation show and actually, the space that the sauropods had left between them and it was so narrow that, if she had passed between, the ankylosaur would have hit Rocinante in the chest with its club, killing her instantly and unhorse her riders.  
Thus, they ride back, looking for a gap in the middle of the herd.

Fearing the horns of the first, the spikes of the second and the ill-tempered behaviour of the third, they avoided the ceratopsians, the thyreophorans (*) and the pachycephalosaurs, and rather looked at the level of the duck bills and small bipedal herbivores, generally more placid.  
However, the latter advanced so close to each other that Rocinante would have had a hard time weaving in and out among them, not to mention the fact that the proximity of so many large dinosaurs made her nervous and that she would have hesitated a lot to do anything her riders would have told her to do.

They arrived near the mamenchisaur which was walking in the centre and noticed that there was no animal between them and it while on the other side, there were only a few dryosaurs and young _Gallimimus_ between which Rocinante could easily pass.  
Zach watched for a moment the moves of the mamenchisaur and the animals around it before spurring Rocinante.

She hesitated a little, biting her bit, and let out a little nervous neighing but despite everything, she moved forward and trotted between the legs of the mamenchisaur. She almost threatened to trample the yinlongs advancing beneath the sauropod as they passed under its huge belly and on the other side, the dryosaurs and _Gallimimus_ swiftly moved aside when they saw the horse coming.  
The mare and her riders finally emerged from the herd and after about twenty meters in a straight line, they turned to their right and she galloped along the herd at a good distance.  
They eventually passed it and then headed for a ridge to the east.

They stopped at its summit, about six hundred meters southwest of the Cartago Aviary that rose behind them, and from their location, their eyes went far, beyond the southern limits of the Reserve and the Rio Iris, to the Southern Plateau and its narrow valleys and vales to the southwest and the ocean to the southeast.  
Between the two, their field of vision also included Burroughs and the Lagoon.

"The city," Zach recognized. "We're almost safe. I think the worst is behind us."

They looked at Burroughs and its welcoming valley with a certain hope for a few moments and then resumed their journey, riding towards the road that led to the bridge.

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) _Thyreophora_ : One of the three major groups of ornithischian ("bird-hipped") dinosaurs. Literally means "shield-bearers" in Greek. Stegosaurians and ankylosaurians belong to this clade.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_**

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._

 _Thanks to_ _lazyshiitake_ _for the fav._


	65. Trapped

When Dearing and Grady regained the control of their motor functions after the initial shock of their sudden fall, they noticed that they were surrounded by the wet rocky walls of a small cave. A cold sensation gripped them and it was by moving their limbs that they realized they were in the water.  
The entire cave was flooded and at the spot just under the hole through which they had fallen, there was about one meter fifty of water, deep enough for having preventing them to crash against the rocks in the bottom.  
Where they had washed up, halfway between the centre of the room and its periphery, the depth was smaller, about twenty-five centimetres.  
Grady turned on his back and saw the hole. He estimated the distance between the latter and the water's surface at just six meters.  
The hole wasn't actually located above the centre of the cave but closer to the wall opposite of them.  
The keeper scanned the rest of the room.

It wasn't very large, thirty square meters at best, and it didn't seemed that were passageways to other rooms or no longer since those which existed before were now blocked by piles of rocks.  
He then looked at the walls and saw that in some places, large knobbed roots had managed to pierce the rock and spread into the cave but they were too high for them, even if they jumped and in the case where they would have succeeded, they would have been unable to reach the hole in the ceiling.  
Grady looked up at it and listened carefully for a while. No sound other than bird calls or the rustle of the leaves reaching him, he relaxed.

"I think she didn't find us,' he told to Dearing in a low voice.

She didn't said anything back and kept staring at the water in which they were sitting.  
Knowing that she was still disturbed by what had happened with Hamada in the Center, he asked her some clarifications.

"He forced me to stab him," she answered when he asked her the question.

"Forced? What do you mean?" He asked, without any hint of judgment in his voice though.

"He begged me to put an end to his sufferings. I didn't wanted to do it so he guided the blade to his heart."

Dearing began to cry.

"I didn't had the strength to prevent him to do so. I can't believe that I killed a man," she added. "The others will kill me once they will learn about it."

In a comforting gesture, Grady knelt in front of her and gently put his hands on her shoulders.

"Hey. Hey. Take a breath," he told her as he encouraged her to look him in the eyes. "You didn't kill him out of your own will and I assure you that they will understand. We'll talk about it once we will be safe again. Now, we have to find a way out of this hole."

Dearing dried her tears and nodded. Grady stood up to scan the cave again.

Looking more closely, Grady noted that erosion had dug a well-like recess in one of the walls, not far from the hole. At its upper end, the recess met the ceiling.  
His bag was washed up a few feet away from them, but his rifle was nowhere to be seen.

"Did you see my rifle?" He asked, turning to Dearing. I may had lost it when we fell."

Darkness suddenly fell in the cave and Dearing's eyes suddenly widened, full with terror. When he turned his head towards the hole in the ceiling, Grady knew why.

Without a sound, the Indominus had tilted her head over the hole, so she could better see him and Dearing and look at them with her green eye.

"Oh shit..." Grady swore.

He and Dearing stepped backwards and flattened against the furthest wall from the hole. The Indominus introduced her snout inside the latter as best as she could.  
She opened her jaws, to let out her long black tongue with purple reflections which slid in the air like a snake stretching from a branch. Grady noted that the dorsal surface of the first fifty centimetres of the tongue were covered with long thorn-like rear-facing lingual papillae.  
But not being able to be projected further than six meters from the mouth, it stopped in the middle of the cave and since it couldn't reach her preys, the Indominus retracted it inside her mouth and closed it before pulling out her snout out of the hole.  
Grady and Dearing then thought that they just had to wait for the guards to arrive but their relief was short-lived and was gone as soon as they saw the Indominus introduce a hand in the hole and close it around a part of the ceiling. She tore off a block the size of a suitcase and let in fall.  
Realizing that she was enlarging the hole, Grady and Dearing were struck with terror but they couldn't go anywhere and had to watch the blocks of rock fall one at a time in the water.

Once the hole was sufficiently enlarged, the Indominus introduced her head and looked at them straight in the eyes for a moment, her gaze penetrating theirs as she intended to make them yield to fear and despair. She then wide opened her maw, up to a point where the move seemed unrealistic because just like a boa that was about to close its jaws around a prey, the Indominus could widen her two lower half-jaws so considerably that they separated and left only a flexible ligament at the anterior end.  
Not only all her teeth were now exposed but also her palate lined with structures similar to those found on the tongue as well as the opening in the bottom of her mouth at the entrance of which the tongue rested.  
The latter left the mouth again and returned in the cave.  
Grady then unsheathed his machete and stood in front of Dearing, ready to counter the tongue which was now able to reach them.

Once the tongue was five feet away from him, he rose the blade and rushed forward to strike a blow, but it avoided it and as the keeper was preparing his next attack, it suddenly retracted several meters back before retaliating.  
With a quick, sweeping blow, she knocked him down and hitting the rocks left him stun.

Grady neutralized, the tongue inexorably approached Dearing and trying to escape it, she began to follow the wall but in a flash, the tongue reached the director and coiled itself around her calf like a tentacle before dragging her towards the opposite wall.  
As Dearing struggled, the thorny papillae sank deeper in her flesh, raising her a scream of pain, but as her face was about to go underwater, she managed to catch the handle of the machete, which was lying next to Grady's unconscious body, with her fingertips and closed her grip on it.  
She tried to get up in order to strike blows to the tongue but each time she missed it and pulled towards the monstrous open maw above her, Dearing ended up hanging upside down.

She didn't wanted her life to end this way and gathered all the adrenaline in her body. She raised her bust up and in the same movement, she struck the tongue with a blow so powerful that the blade cut through one half of the organ.  
The tongue threatening to yield if the Indominus didn't hurry to bring Dearing between her jaws as her feet were only a few tens of centimetres from the dinosaur's snout, Dearing rose again her bust and gave another blow to the tongue, near where she had struck before.

This time, the blade sliced the tongue and she fell back in the water a little more than five meters below while the Indominus retracted what was left of her tongue and bellowed in pain.  
This loss angered her and she hastened to destroy the rest of the ceiling.  
Dearing resurfaced, machete in hand, and avoiding the falling rock, she returned to Grady and pulled him to safety back to the same wall against which they had stood.  
With a grimace, she removed the part of the tongue still coiled around her bloody calf and threw it away.

Meanwhile, the Indominus managed to introduce into the cavern the front part of her body, up to her forelimbs. In the way her hands were resting on the walls, she didn't seemed that confident, as if she feared they would collapse under her weight and that she would fall head first in the cave and get stuck there.

When he regained consciousness, Grady was surprised to see Dearing standing behind him, panting and pointing the blood-stained blade of the machete towards the Indominus, which was furiously roaring at them while blood spurted from her severed tongue.  
Deducing that it was Dearing who had inflicted this to her, Grady could not help but look at her with amazed eyes, impressed by the courage she showed in this desperate situation.  
Amid the Indominus' shrieks of anger and frustration, they began to hear the roar of a helicopter, followed by a loud music, a rock song.  
The Indominus stopped roaring and shrieking and pulled herself out of the hole to listen carefully while they started to hear distinctly the lyrics:

 _I wanna see it painted black, painted black  
Black as night, black as coal  
I wanna see the sun, blotted out from the sky  
I wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black_

The guards had finally arrived and frightened by the sounds of the helicopter, the Indominus fled.

Shortly after, the music stopped and the helicopter's sounds gradually faded in the distance within the following minute.  
Grady knew that vehicles were also probably part of the hunting party and were going to arrive soon but he realized soon enough that the guards must have been told that he and Dearing were in the Center. But they had ended up in this unknown cave.  
Both then sought to tell someone about their location.  
He grabbed the bag and they took the cell phone and the radio. Their faces decomposed. Dearing noted that her cell phone was wet and she tried to light it, in vain.

"It's wet…," she realized with horror.

"And the radio too," Grady said as he checked the latter.

Their means of communication being broken, they exchanged an anxious glance.

"Dammit!" Dearing swore. "What are we gonna do?"

They were trapped in this cave without any way out.

X

Having reached the old Visitor Center, Laurence paused the music track on her Ipod, fixed near the instrument panel, and her and the three guards aboard the Pegasus, Benedek, Holmund and Sunsin, a Korean, scanned the jungle in search of a great whitish shape.

As planned, they had followed the trajectory of the signal of Verplancke's beacon and when it had remained at the coordinates that matches those of Jurassic Park Visitor Center, they knew that the Indominus had stopped there and then, the text sent by Dearing to the control room had confirmed her presence in the ruins.  
However, they did not exactly know what had happened to Hamada since his helmet's camera had ran out of battery before the I. rex reached the Center.  
Maybe Grady and Dearing knew but they were not to be seen anywhere and had not shown any sign of life since.

The Pegasus hovered above the Center and none of the guards seeing anything among the ruins of the rotunda, it began to describe larger circles around the ruins, flying close to the treetops.

"Come on, show yourself…" Sunsin said with irritation as he tapped the top of the Minigun.

X

They continued the search for a few minutes and while the marauders were about one kilometre from the Center, the leaves began to fall in abundance from the trees while trunks vibrated.

Highly fearing the cause behind this phenomenon, Brunet ordered to the marauders' drivers to stop in the middle of a clearing in order to protect the vehicles from eventual falling trees.  
There came a rumble, first dull, then growing, a thunderous roll with prolonged echoes. Then the earth shook.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_**

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._


	66. The moment the earth shook

The earthquake, of a length of two minutes and sixteen seconds, showed an intensity of seven on Richter scale.  
With such intensity, the ground moves so much that a man has difficulties to stand and in the northern half of the island, all were brutally thrown to the ground while trees were shaking all across Nublar and soon after, they began to fall, acting in some places as several meters high obstacles difficult to pass over and in others, including in the south of the island, they collapsed on the fences, interrupting the electric current or much worse, creating breaches.

The Limes withstood to the few trees that fell on it but two landslides, one at the level of the northern limit of the Reserve and the other in the hills east of the Embrace, took away entire portions of the fence.  
What remained of San Fernandez and Jurassic Park's visitor complex shook like rickety toys and half a minute after the end of the earthquake, the ruined building began to crumble. Everything fell apart: the walls collapsed, just like the ceilings, big blocks of stone or concrete crashed down in the jungle.

Even if the Indominus hadn't woke up during her surgery operation and would have been put back in her paddock, the events that occurred the same day would have given her the opportunity to escape since parts of the rock walls of the circus that enclosed the paddock broke away and crashed down on the feeding crane's platform. The platform fell in the paddock, forming with the fallen rocks a scree that the Indominus could have climbed on to bypass the high concrete wall, now fissured.

X

On the road to the bridge, Zach and Gray felt Rocinante's legs wobble beneath them and disconcerted, the mare let out a half-panicked neigh.

"Whoa!" Zach said before patting her neck.

Gray then pointed to the shaking palm trees of a nearby grove and bellows and other worried calls came from the north.  
The fear of ending up again among a panicked her seized the boys and Zach spurred their horse. Rossinante reared a little and then galloped.

X

In Burroughs, visitors, employees, and animals alike had been scared just by hearing the Sibo grumbling in the distance and feeling the tremor that were making all of them wooble.  
The walls started to lost pieces and the lightly built structures partially collapsed, some entirely, then it was the turn of some of the stone or concrete constructions to begin to yield to the earthquake's onslaught.  
Some walls collapsed with a crash and took with them a part of the frameworks and the roofs they supported, trapping under rubble those who did not had the time to leave the buildings or sheltering themselves under the furniture.  
Statues fell from roofs or pedestals, smashing themselves into pieces against the ground, or worse on the unfortunate who didn't managed to avoid them in time, like this woman whose scream of terror was cut short when the decapitated head of one of the stone giraffatitans fell on her, killing her instantly.

The Administration was not spared either since a part of the end of the promontory on which the building rested broke off from the rest, taking with it a small portion of the building, including the helipad, in a cascade of rocks and rubble, leaving gaping openings in place of the rooms that once stood there.  
Luckily, all of those who were in this part had moved away from the edge of the promontory and went to the atrium and the tower, and no one died within the Administration.

X

In the control room, damages were much more limited because the room had been designed and built in a way to resist to the worst elements and hazards like earthquakes but frightened, some had took cover under their desks.

" _Warning! Exodus protocol launched_ ," the synthetic voice said in a tone so calm that it was chilling. " _All visitors and non-essential employees are requested to return to Burroughs to prepare for a general evacuation of the island. This is not a drill_."

The information was transmitted to everyone through the speakers in the park or by SMS to the employees but the earthquake had left a great confusion and most were overwhelmed. Thus, the evacuation was organized with great difficulty.  
On one of the screens, one could see on a map the ships of Ogen's fleet that were heading towards the island change course while on a retransmission of the display screen at Caldera's terminal, it was written that all crossings were now cancelled.

A few moments later, the radio began to sputter.

" _Control? It's Alana_ ," said a young woman's voice, one of the guides. " _I am with a group of visitors at the top of a hill north of the Jungle Trading Post. Send a helicopter to pick us up please. People are really starting to panic!_ "

"How many are you, Alana?" Cruthers asked her.

" _A dozen_."

"The _Pegasus_ is busy," Harriman reminded him. "We can't call it back."

"It's not the only aircraft on the island," Masrani said. "What is the status of the tour helicopters?"

"Because of the troubles in the north, the tours have been cancelled and they have been left in the depot since," Cruthers told him.

"Good. Assign a J-SEC officer to each of the helicopters and send them to their location as soon as possible," Masrani ordered.

"Yes sir."

Masrani grabbed an earpiece and put it.

"Alana? It's Mister Masrani," he said. "Help is on the way."

" _Thank you very much, sir_."

Distracted by multiple reports of containment anomalies all over the island, Harriman did not immediately notice the one from the Limes' gate at the gap.

When he noticed it, he immediately wanted to know what caused it since its proximity to the area around the old Visitor Center where the Indominus was last seen.  
On the CCTV footage, he saw her, ramming the same gate through which she had entered into the Reserve hours before.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_**

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._


	67. Hell Storks

" _We have eyes on the target, at the gap's gate_ ," he informed the guards.

"Heard," Laurence replied.

The Pegasus headed for the mentioned gate and arrived at the Limes a few moments later.

The guards found the gate knocked down and passing over it, they faced Mount Sibo. Benedek pulled his head out of the aircraft to look at the volcano.

"Great God...," he swore.

The volcano was no longer rumbling but at its summit, the lava dome convulsed and exploded, releasing a black and burning cloud of ash and throwing tephra in every direction.  
The staccato of lava explosions followed, and the heart of the tumultuous cloud reddened while all around the volcano, holes appeared in the ground and from deep wells and crevices, smoke and fumes burst forth.  
Volcanic bombs began to rip through the skies, crashing down on the slopes or in the middle of Little Gorgoroth, which was soon to become like its fictional namesake. Other projectiles landed in the forested areas north-west of the hot springs resort and west of the I. rex Coliseum, lighting up starts of fire.  
Ash started to fell in great quantity.

As Laurence gazed at the eruption with great apprehension, Holmund saw the Indominus running under the trees.

"At one o'clock!" She shouted.

Seeing that the Indominus was heading north, Benedek could not help to add in a half disdainful, half concerned tone:

"What a complete idiot… She's heading towards the volcano."

Suddenly, the Indominus turned eastward, towards a ridge line that started from the northern mountainous arc of the Embrace and ran along a northwest-southeast axis.  
From their position, the guards could easily see the struts of an aviary in spite of the mist in which they were partly concealed.

"Wait, she is going towards the quetzals' aviary…"

Having heard and see the helicopter, the Indominus turned her head and let out a powerful deterrent roar.

"Let's smoke her!" Sunsin roared.

He loaded the Minigun and started firing, aiming at the Indominus through the thick foliage.  
After the first shot, he waited, scanning the jungle below and when he saw that she was still running, he cursed himself and fired again but each shot missed his target by only a few meters.

The Indominus reappeared in a small gently sloping meadow, crossed in its middle by a dirt road that lead straight towards the aviary, built in a small cirque of volcanic origin whose entirety was enclosed within the quetzalcoatluses' aviary.  
Although the latter was only of a height of ninety-one meters (near two times smaller than the aviary over the Cartago) and a surface of four hectares, it still remained an impressive structure from ground level and like for the other aviary, a net with a tight mesh extended between the struts.  
Where the road met the aviary, at the entrance of the cirque, there was a gateway, made of two gates connected by an enclosed corridor and which was used by maintenance and park keeper's vehicles.

The Indominus stopped right in front of it, fearing to hurt herself by ramming the outer gate but also because she was somewhat frightened by the panicked and strident shrieks of the pterosaurs, scared like never before because of the eruption and left there to their fate.  
Sometimes one of the flying reptiles clang on the aviary's beams to shriek in vain before flying back further inside.  
Thus in the open and her way blocked, she was now an easy target for the _Pegasus_ ' weapons.

"No one shoot!" Laurence ordered though. "The last thing we need is allowing the Hell Storks and the harpactos to escape…"

" _Pegasus_. _We just passed the Limes_ ," Brunet told her. " _We will be here soon_."

About two minutes passed where the Indominus and the guards aboard the _Pegasus_ defiantly stared at each other.  
Every time she tried to walk along the aviary, trying to escape and not without showing nervousness, the helicopter immediately followed her and came to hover her intended path.  
Meanwhile, as a large and threatening plume rose from the Sibo, the sky became dark as in the middle of the night and the first lightning streaks the tumultuous clouds.  
It had rained earlier; the jungle was impregnated with dampness, the air oversaturated with moisture. All conditions were there for an electrical storm.

Following the road, the marauders finally emerged from the shadows of the trees and advanced in the open, stopping only a hundred meters from the Indominus with each vehicle on one side of the road.  
While the drivers were making the engines roar to deter her to advance, archers get out of the marauders and took position next to them.  
They aimed at the Indominus and commanding them, Darbinian was ready to give them the order.  
In the marauder left of her, Brunet, sitting at the front, had his gaze turned on the dinosaur.

"Loose!" He ordered.

Darbinian relayed the order and the bows sang but when the arrows were about to fall on her, the Indominus suddenly flattened on the ground and turned her head towards the aviary, in order to protect it and her weak points.  
The arrows came to bristle her back but their trips didn't sank far enough in the skin, preventing the venom from entering her body.

"Do you want to play to this game?" Brunet said. "Let's play it…"

He grabbed the radio to send an order to the _Pegasus_ and right after, the harpoon gun fired and a harpoon sank in the Indominus' shoulder, raising her a shriek of pain.

"This one was for Katashi!" Laurence shouted with anger.

Wanting to avoid receiving another harpoon, the Indominus moved again but corned and hurt, she began to pant out of panic while looking with fear at the helicopter.

"Ah! You're screwed, huh?! You're screwed!" Sunsin taunted her. "And by the way, did you lose your tongue?" He added, noting that it had been cut off.

While the harpoon gun was reloaded, the Indominus withstood a second volley of arrows and once again, she flattened and let the arrows sank in her hard hide in the case where they didn't just rebounded against it.  
The archers then notched a third arrow but suddenly, before the _Pegasus_ could fire, the Indominus stood up and furiously charged them.

In over three seconds, she covered half the distance that separated her from the vehicles but before the caught off guard archers could retreat and the gunner took place and press the trigger of the cannons on top of the marauders, she quickly turned, much to their surprise, and headed straight for the gateway.  
Benefiting from the force accumulated during her charge, the Indominus lowered her head and rammed the outer portal, breaking it down without much difficulty before disappearing in the aviary's mist, much to the dismay of the guards who looked horrified at the now open gate.  
The Indominus was heard forcing her way through the inner gate, then the panicked and strident shrieks of the aviary's denizens redoubled in intensity, shrieks to which she responded with a long roar.

A few seconds later, twelve great creatures came out of the gateway, galloping with an ease that some would have considered as off because of the nature and the singular look of the animals.

Tall as a giraffe and with a wingspan of almost twelve meters, _Quetzalcoatlus_ was the largest pterosaur species that had ever existed and among the last to fly in the skies of the Cretaceous, like if as a last feat, this order of flying reptiles had sought to push the limits of biomechanics by creating the largest flying animal ever discovered.

Actually, as palaeontologists had theorized since a few years and as Jurassic World's staff had discovered, _Quetzalcoatlus_ spent most of its time on the ground.  
During the last days of the Cretaceous, _Quetzalcoatlus_ must have behaved like a stork, striding across the plains of Laramidia (*) and catching in its beak any prey that passed within range, including juvenile dinosaurs as well as any animal that could be swallowed, and thus, those housed in the aviary naturally saw humans as prey. The latter were frightened by the quetzalcoatluses, terrified by their appearance and horrified by their behaviour.

Their long sharp pointed bill, white as lime, ended a red skull stained with black around the eyes and surmounted by a short and high crest. The neck was long, pinkish, and as bare and wrinkled as those of vultures and marabou storks, while the wings were charcoal grey, the base of the neck covered with white pycnofibers and the underside of a pale grey colour. All of these elements gave them the sinister and repulsive appearance of creatures that looked like they had been spewed out of Hades, and this, combined with the way they attacked, pushed many to compare them to the winged mounts of the ringwraiths of the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy, called Hell Hawks, and with this name in mind, park keepers and grey guards nicknamed the quetzalcoatluses Hell Storks and sometimes Hades Storks.

Due to their dangerousness, the keepers that cleaned the aviary were escorted by grey guards who, wearing special armours sprayed with ammonia, repelled the pterosaurs with an ultrasound device while the keepers washed the ground with a fire hose.  
This was one of the tasks they apprehended the most because the quetzalcoatluses were neither the only occupants of the aviary, nor the most numerous.

Following the twelve quetzalcoatluses that took flight just in front of the marauders, a swarm of more than fifty smaller pterosaurs flew out of the gateway. The adults had a wingspan of two and a half meters and all were black-faced and had a body covered with a black spotted coat of greenish yellow pycnofibres.  
 _  
Harpactognathus gentryii_ , a Late Jurassic aerial predator, as comfortable over the plains as under the forests' canopy.  
While the coat of this species evoked the one of the Leopard, with which _Harpactognathus_ had in common the ability of climbing trees with great ease, the behaviour of this species recalled more of the one of this other predatory mammal that is the African wild dog since just like it, _Harpactognathus_ was a very social species and attacked in packs, called formations, which could chase their prey over great distances, by harassing them from the air as well as by running on the ground according to the situation.  
With its solid body and wider than tall skull, its sharply-pointed teeth, its bony crest covered with soft tissue which ran from the tip of the snout to the top of the skull, and its long elongated tail with a diamond-shaped end, _Harpactognathus gentryii_ was the thing that looked like the most like the very incarnation of the pterosaur as depicted in popular culture.

During the feeding show, one or several entire cows were given to the pterosaurs and the quetzalcoatluses arrived first on the carcass to tear the skin and large pieces of flesh. Then, once they had finished, the harpactognathuses swooped on the leftovers, cleaning the carcass until only a few scattered pieces of flesh remained on the bones. Thus, because of their different feeding strategies, the two species did not compete and tolerated each other, and this despite the irascible behaviour of the Hell Storks.

Seeing the pterosaurs fly towards the _Pegasus_ , Laurence moved away from their trajectory while in the cabin, her companions aimed the Minigun and the harpoon gun to the swarm and were ready to fire if they received the order.  
But desiring first of all to flee the Indominus and the eruption, the pterosaurs ignored the aircraft and passed right by to head south.

X

The escape of the pterosaurs was a sight at once captivating and appalling that the technicians watched powerless.  
While Krill reported in a panicked voice this breach of containment to all employees, Harriman alerted the guards that weren't part of the hunting party.

Knowing what was the best thing to do, or at least the most pragmatic, Hoskins briefly turned to Masrani as if to make sure that he had his approval for the order he was about to give but the Indian tycoon had disappeared since the beginning of the eruption.

"Lieutenant Laurence!" He barked without losing another moment. "Do not let these pterosaurs escape! Nobody wants another Horseshoe Bay."

Hoskins' fears were justified.

He had seen the damages that three pteranodons could make, then twelve quetzalcoatluses, larger and even more vicious animals, it could only end in a disaster.  
From his point of view, it was even a worse situation than the escape of the Indominus since anatomical studies had shown that despite their predominantly terrestrial lifestyle, quetzalcoatluses could cover great distances if they were left to fly freely, hundreds or even thousands of kilometres, not unlike many migratory birds and some of these were able to go from one end of the globe to the other. It had been estimated that quetzalcoatluses escaped from Nublar could reach Cartagena in just a few days, and there was even the fear that some individuals attempt to cross the Caribbean and then the Atlantic. If conditions were favourable to them, those could reach West Africa and even the Iberian Peninsula.

The _Harpactognathus_ , on the other hand, were not made for long flights and many doubted that would manage to cross the distance that separated Isla Nublar from the Nicoya Peninsula, or even that would dare to venture above the ocean.  
But by staying confined to the island, their plague-like swarm posed a great threat to any animal that wasn't big enough to dissuade them from attacking it. And they were very hungry since they hadn't been yet fed that day.  
If they reached Burroughs...

X

The marauders drove away from the aviary and turned south, trying to follow the pterosaur while the Pegasus was doing the same.  
Laurence hesitated briefly whether they should fire or not.

"Hoskins is right," she finally said. "We must prevent them from leaving."

" _Don't engage, Erin!_ " Darbinian shouted in the radio. " _They would rush on you immediately and you are outnumbered!_ "

" _Indeed Darbinian but we cannot stood idly by and watch them flying away!_ " Brunet intervened.

Laurence glanced briefly at a picture slid under one of the instrument panel, showing her and her sons at metal music festival. She then looked at her colleagues in the cabin, who nodded to her, approving whatever she intended to do.

"No time to argue! Our job is to prevent them leaving this island, we must act now!"

She stared at the swarm with a resolute air and then inhaled.

"Fire at will!" She commanded as she exhaled and choose a song from a Swedish melodic death metal band in her Ipod's playlist.

At the sound of the music in the loudspeaker, the Minigun and the harpoon gun both fired at the same time and several of the pterosaurs, including one of the quetzalcoatluses, drifted in full flight before plummeting to the ground, their wings pierced or their bodies riddled with projectiles.

" _Erin!_ " Darbinian yelled.

Whereas the harpactognathuses immediately went to take cover under the canopy and scattered, the quetzalcoatluses, irritated in part by the music, turned to swoop on the _Pegasus_.

X

In Brunet's marauder, a tablet was given to the Frenchman and he watched the footage from the _Pegasus_ ' on-board cameras.  
He saw the pterosaurs closing fast the distance between them and the helicopter, preparing to surround it.

"Get out of this shit!" He shouted at the pilot.

X

But Laurence held her position and the quetzalcoatluses being able to make burst of speeds of one hundred and eighty kilometres per hour, they were on the Pegasus in no time.

They first hit the helicopter and attempted to hang on it, shaking the aircraft, pecking at the cabin while avoiding getting too close from the blades.  
With their hits, they made Sunsin lose his balance and he narrowly grabbed the footboard but a quetzalcoatlus suddenly appeared on his left and closed its beak on his torso to take him away.

"Up! Up!" Benedek shouted to Laurence.

While some of the quetzalcoatluses were squabbling over Sunsin's body, the Pegasus ascended and quickly gained altitude, moving closer to the black cloud where the electric storm struck in blinding bluish-white explosions. Lightning flashed around like raindrops and the thunder wasn't heard punctually but continuously, like the roar of a waterfall.  
The guards thought that the pterosaurs would not dare to come and attack them so close to the cloud but overcame by frenzy, the quetzalcoatluses still pursued them and the battle moved over the northern arc of the Embrace.  
Benedek then rushed to the Minigun and fired on the nearest pterosaur whose body jumped as bullets pierced it.  
Holmund screamed in his back and the Hungarian gave a brief glance over his shoulder.  
A quetzalcoatlus had introduced its beak inside the cabin and pierced her right through her chest while she was holding a harpoon in her hand. The pterosaur suddenly pulled its beak out and hurled Holmund's body in the void.  
Not wanting to suffer the same fate, Benedek moved as far as possible from the outside, forcing him to abandon the heavy weapons, and standing with his back facing the cockpit, he unsheathed his pistol and waited for the next attack.  
The latter came in a flash and he could only shot twice before his foot was dragged out of the _Pegasus_.

The quetzalcoatluses having just killed her three colleagues, Laurence started to panic since there was no one left to use the Minigun or the harpoon cannon, leaving the aircraft completely vulnerable to the Hell Storks' attacks.  
As the pterosaurs were flying around the aircraft and shrieking at it, the pilot began a fallback manoeuvre but she ended up facing one of the quetzalcoatluses and its little whitish eyes stared at her.  
The beak of the pterosaur suddenly pierced the windshield and its tip sank into the pilot's abdomen and moved a little inside it, reaching and tearing several of her internal organs.  
The beak pulled out from inside the cockpit and under the shock of pain, Laurence put her hands out of the controls to put one on her belly, watching with horror the blood abundantly pouring out of the wound.  
The aircraft plummeted and the quetzalcoatlus barely had the time to react that the blades sliced off his neck and splashed the windshield with blood. The decapitated head jumped into the air for a second before falling back and then being torn to pieces by the blades.  
Laurence did not immediately realize that the Pegasus had begun an inexorable fall to the rolling meadows of the valley below because the blood on the windshield prevented her to see while the panicked sirens of the warning lights troubled her concentration.  
It tired her senses considerably and Laurence lost consciousness while her blood had already stained her knees and the seat underneath.

The helicopter violently hit the ground, bounced and let of trail of metal pieces across several tens of meters before bursting into flames. The music had stopped at the moment of the impact.

X

The destruction of the _Pegasus_ and the death of Laurence and the three other guards aboard the aircraft deeply overwhelmed their comrades, already distraught by the escape of the pterosaurs.  
For some, this last event, combined with the eruption of Mount Sibo and the devastating earthquake that had struck the island, looked like a dire omen announcing the end of the world.

"To Burroughs!" Brunet finally ordered.

The marauders passed the harpactognathuses and once out of the jungle, the drivers shift up to the fifth gear and drove south across the meadows and the fields.

* * *

 **Annotations:**

(*) Island continent that stretched from present-day Alaska to Mexico and which existed during the Late Cretaceous, when the Western Interior Seaway divided North America in two.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_**

 _If you enjoyed this chapter or the previous ones, don't hesitate to leave a review and, if it hadn't already been done, to follow and fav. I will gladly read your feedback._


	68. Dark Clouds, Dark Wings

Masrani and a few others stood on the Eye, their eyes filled with fear looking north when confusion and panic reigned in Burroughs and beyond.

In the Zoo, animals were bellowing, roaring, shrieking and yelping, all worried by the eruption; while at Richard Owen Avenue, visitors came out of the building en masse to gather in the centre of the avenue and on the Obelisk Plaza where park keepers rushed to help the coach drivers who were struggling to control their teams of mantellisaurs.  
Here and there in the city, small fires had broken out, mainly because of breaches in the gas lines and J-SEC had sent teams to control them and rescue those who had been trapped following the earthquake.  
On the Eye as well as from every window, balcony, roof or terrace looking out onto Mount Sibo, all could not help but to watch powerless the summit of the mountain glow and the northern sky darkens and being set alight by a multitude of lightning's flashes while the volcanic plume only swelled and rose higher and higher.

X

Having just passed over the southern mountainous arc of the Embrace, the quetzalcoatluses saw the central fields beneath and ahead of them.

With his piercing sight, the leading individual spotted something curious in the distance, kilometres south.  
Beyond a river, there was a large lush valley, bounded in the west by the edges of a large plateau and in the east by hills bordering the ocean.  
In the centre of the valley, there was a large body of water and it would have been an idyllic place of refuge if there wasn't what seemed to be at first strange rock formations near its edges.  
In the west, it saw dozens and dozens of herbivores forming a long column in the fields and heading towards a large lake before the edges of a plateau.

Faced with the wrath of the mountain of fire and the Great Fear that scourged the north, dinosaurs and other animals were fleeing south, seeking for a refuge beyond the Long Lake and the Rio Iris, in the protected valleys and vales in the shadow of the Southern Plateau as well as in the highlands on top of the latter.  
But in doing so, they were dangerously approaching the World of Men and those weren't going to let their lands being invaded by a massive influx of refugee creatures. Most of their dwellings had been established in the same valley that the quetzalcoatlus now coveted. Confrontation was inevitable.

With a shriek, the leading individual urged the others to follow it and in a hurricane of wings, they rushed south towards Burroughs while the tour helicopters, that had picked up the group stranded in the northern part of the Cartago valley, were going back towards the aviary above the river, less than a kilometre and a half from the position of the great pterosaurs.

Meanwhile, shadow fell upon Isla Nublar.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _This chapter marks the end of the first half of the story. Yes, half, and things will only get darker and darker in the second one. How do you think the story will play out until the end? (To those that might had read the French version, please don't spoil the other readers here. If you want to discuss about it, you can do it in PM)._

 _All the published chapters have been grouped in the PDF I mentioned in the notes of **Scavengers**. The PDF (which also include two maps and the list of species housed in the park) is now available and the link to download it is in the following reddit post: __**r/JurassicPark/comments/e639re/proud_to_share_the_first_half_of_my_jurassic/** _

_I would like to know what you think of this re-imagining so far. Don't worry, unlike some of the animals featured in it, I don't bite and I greatly invite you to share your thoughts in the review section (or by PM for the shy ones ;) ). Don't hesitate to tell me what are your favourite scenes, characters, creatures and locations (and other elements that came to your mind) or in the opposite, those you liked the least or even not at all, and to name the strengths and the flaws of this story._

 _While I'm at it, I inform you that this story might not be updated before a few months since I will be busy with other things. But don't worry, I will keep an eye here and until then, I wish you in advance a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year._

 _Thank you again for reading._


	69. The Swarm

_Greetings dear readers,_

 _After a two-month break, I have the pleasure to publish the first chapters of the second half of this story._

 _Enjoy._

* * *

Every parts of the cave's ceiling that the I. rex had not destroyed, they were by the earthquake. The latter forced Dearing and Grady to huddle against the walls, the arms raised above the head to protect themselves from falling rocks.

As the last blocks that made the ceiling fell, Grady glanced at the recess in the wall opposite of them.

"Are we dumb?!" He exclaimed.

He stepped back, grabbed his backpack and gathered all his strength in his arm to threw it over the edge of the gaping hole.

"Now let's climb the walls of this recess ..." he said afterwards.

"Climb them? But there are no grips!"

The water level suddenly dropped. A noise similar to that of an emptying tub or sink became perceptible. Aware that this didn't looked too good, they hurried to swim to the recess.

"We must try. I have a solution to this issue."

Moments later, as the earthquake had passed and all the water was gone, the two were climbing the walls of the recess in a very special way: Back to back, legs bent and arms crossed, they were vertically walking on the rock step by step, at a slow but regular and coordinated pace in order to not exhaust each other.  
Although Grady had told her to stay focused on climbing, Dearing couldn't help but to think about the method suggested by the parker because it seemed familiar. Vague memories of an animated film she saw when she was a student came back to her mind.

"This idea to get us out of here ... Isn't it from some Disney?" She asked.

"Could be."

"Goddammit…" She hissed, not reassured by this semi-confirmation that implied that he was risking their survival on an idea that came from a film and not based on a real-life situation where it had shown its efficiency.

There was a loud rolling sound and the bottom of the cave, then a pile of rock blocks of various sizes and shapes, began to move, first slowly before suddenly sliding towards the middle of the cave, to its deepest point, and it collapsed, revealing a bottomless abyss.

"Let's save our breath!" He told her. "If one of us fall, the other will fall too!"

Having no other choice, they continued the ascent.

However, fooled by the perspective effect, Grady had not noticed earlier that the higher the recess went, the more it widened, forcing them to gradually unfold their legs in order to keep their feet flat against the walls.  
If they pursued climbing, their legs would become too outstretched and with fatigue or, in the case of Dearing and her wounded calf, pain, one of them would yield.

"Fuck…" He said in a sigh, realising the precariousness of their situation.

Suddenly, they began to hear one of the large trees around the cave begin to wobble and being mostly uprooted before falling, with the crown and the upper part of the trunk just above the cave turned abyss. This event was a godsend for the director and the keeper because thick and long vines now hung in the air, some so close that they could potentially reach them by stretching out the arms.

"Ah! A _deus ex machina_!" Dearing said in a voice mixing hope, sarcasm and disbelief.

"Don't move. I'm going to catch one," Grady said.

Slowly, he freed his right arm and stretched it towards the nearest vine.

He touched it with his fingertips but it wasn't enough to grasp it so he told Dearing that they had to move sideways a few centimeters. Once they did, he made another attempt and this time, he managed to firmly grasp the vine.

"Got it!"

He took the opportunity to test its solidity by pulling it.

"Turn so that you can put your arms around my neck," he told her.

Dearing, who had pressed her back firmly against his to stay in place, took the time to take a long breath and kept looking up.  
Passing her left arm in front of her face, she placed her hand on Grady's left shoulder, a little hasty to his taste.

"Easy… Don't rush"

She slowly pulled away her right arm and prepared to turn with the help of her feet in order to face Grady's back.  
Thus, she first faced the wall in the back of the recess, then the abyss and the bottom of the cave. The fear of heights seized her and for a second, she froze and began to gasp.

Despite this, she finally put her right hand on the keeper's right shoulder, took her feet off of the walls as blood dripped from her calf and as she moved forward, she gradually passed her arms around his neck.

"Ready? Three... "

She tightened her hold, almost threatening to strangle him, and bending his legs just to have a better momentum once his countdown finished, Grady pushed his feet against the wall and they swing towards the centre of the cave, stopping three meters under the trunk.

"Climb!" He said in a strangled voice.

Dearing loosened her hold around Grady's neck to grab his shoulders before putting one foot and then the other on his hips and jumping upwards to catch the vine.

While adrenaline was rushing in her body, she climbed quickly and once she was on the trunk, Grady began to climb up in his turn.

Fearing that the tree would soon eventually fall into the chasm, they hurriedly crawled on the last meters that separated them from the lower part of the trunk that still rested on the ground.

When they were there, they jumped to the side and walked away for a few steps before dropping to their knees to catch their breath for a moment.

But they were denied the opportunity of having a break.  
A loud explosion in the north made them jump and in every direction, trees fell while parts of the old Visitor Center crumbled.

Grady hastily retrieved his rifle and bag, and then they ran towards their vehicle, but not too fast because of Dearing's wound.

They first wanted to pass between the ridge and the pool but a landslide flowing from the first towards the Center dissuaded them from doing so.

They skirted the Center by the north, returning to the road before turning to their right.

The last remains of the conical roofs broke apart from the structure, just like an entire section of the southern facade.  
Behind, the landslide swept away or submerged everything on its way at such a speed that when the two companions passed in front of the entrance, a slide went through the threshold, pulled the panels from their hinges and hurtled down the steps, forcing Dearing and Grady to move out of the way.

They stopped at a safe distance, helplessly looking Nature's fury tearing down the ruins and burying them. They turned away from this scene only after seeing the doorway break in pieces and the relief that adorned its top, that depicted the same tyrannosaur skeleton as on both park logos, disappear.  
Where the Visitors' Center once stood proudly, there was now only a tide of earth crowned by shaky trees and a layer of vegetation.  
The little that remained of Jurassic Park was gone.

Dearing and Grady left the road a bit further to find the path they had taken earlier and all along it, they had to avoid several falling trees and slalom between or climb over the trunks lying on their way.  
Aside from the staccato of explosions in the north and rumbling that was similar to the sound of thunder, although continuous, a deathly hush had fallen upon the jungle.

As the jeep was only over a hundred of meters away, Grady began to hear cawing sounds in the north.  
He listened attentively to the calls; but Dearing soon realized that they weren't from crows or any other birds but from a different kind of flying animal, one was supposed to be kept captive in one of the park's aviaries.

"Out of the frying pan..." she began.

"…Into the fire…" Grady finished. "Lie down and stay still!" He hissed, pulling her under a dense bush.

Harpactognathuses passed over them, in such numbers that their shadows casted darkness on the ground.  
Both were perfectly aware of the danger posed by these pterosaurs and therefore, make sure to stay still and silent.  
Once the surprise of their escape past, Dearing and Grady wondered about the latter's how and why and their first hypothesis was that the earthquake damaged the aviary enough to create a breach.

It was not until the pterosaurs were far enough away that they got up, but barely had they got going that they felt like snowflakes falling on them.

When she wanted to remove them from her shoulders, Dearing noticed that the film that had been deposited was not white but rather dark grey. Ash.  
This, combined with the powerful earthquake, the sound of explosions, and the continuous rumbling in the sky, made them realize that the eruption of Mount Sibo had begun.  
Nothing keeping them in the north, they went back in the jeep and drove southward.  
Halfway between the Dreadful Lake and the southern arc of the Embrace, they came out of the jungle and stopped at the top of a ridge.

Facing east, they overlooked the northern half of the Central Fields.  
On their left, the Embrace had already passed in the shadow of the thick tempestuous black cloud full of lightning issued by the Sibo and that a strong northern wind was pushing south. Very soon, it was going to pass over the southern arc of the valley, rolling over the summits and the vales like a slow-moving tidal wave.  
Flying towards the meadows, they saw the _Harpactognathus_ ' swarm and Grady grabbed the pair of binoculars in his bag before opening the roof window in order to follow the pterosaurs without leaving the vehicle.

He saw them turn south, towards the limits of his field of vision.

"The eruption is making them flee to the opposite side of the island," he observed.

Dearing froze.

"The opposite... Burroughs...," she said, horrified. "We have to return there!"

"Our arrival won't change anything, it's already too late. The quetzals, because they too must have escaped, will be there in no time and with sixty pterosaurs sowing panic among twenty thousand people in the streets, we would be safer in the jungle. If we go back, we will have to be very careful. For now, let's just follow them. Take the wheel."

They exchanged places and Grady, standing on the passenger seat with the upper part of his body sticking out of the window, motioned to her that he was ready. Following his indications, she drove quickly in the hope that they would catch up with the swarm.


	70. The Bridge

Standing guard at the gate of the Rio Iris gorge bridge, Bill Campbell, a fiftyish black-haired, beefy and paunchy J-SEC officer, was pacing back and forth on the walkway over the gate, between the two watchtowers that flanked the latter. With a preoccupied air, he watched the northern sky darkens while the Sibo was vomiting ashes and other kinds of ejecta.  
From time to time, he scanned the skies with binoculars, searching for the sinister wings of the quetzalcoatluses, and was also listening to the jungle on the other side of the gorge, waiting for hooves' sounds.

He had been informed more than twenty minutes earlier that two young visitors, passengers of the wrecked truck that had been found in the Loudwater valley, had been seen in the outskirts of the safari village. Having spotted the security cameras, they had attracted their attention before showing them their destination on a map: The Rio Iris gorge bridge.  
Thus, despite the devastating earthquake that had occurred in the meantime and the eruption that had begun, Campbell was waiting for these survivors who were expected to arrive at any minute.

When bellows and calls had started to come from the Reserve, the watchman worried a bit for the two survivors and for long minutes, the sounds went on in the middle of a silenced jungle.  
It was then that as they were decreasing in intensity, the noise of a single galloping animal became perceptible. Campbell turned to the Reserve and listened carefully.

He recognized the sound of hooves striking the beaten earth and a few seconds later, a horse with a bay coat, ridden by a young man of about eighteen years and another, younger and smaller, hurtled in full gallop from the bend described by the track shortly after the bridge.

"It's them, Rafael!" Campbell shouted to his colleague who was waiting on the ground, ready to slide the gate. "Open the gate!"

Rocinante crossed the bridge and, still galloping, passed the open gate before being stopped by Zach.

While the officer who had opened the gate closed it back, the one who had spotted them was coming towards them, just like the Canadian grey guard who was waiting until then next to a horse trailer nearby. Zach recognized the individual since he had glimpsed him the night before at the Merry Iguanodon.

Noting that the mare was safe and sound, Niall Forrester approached the dismounted boys to shake their hands out of gratitude.

"Thank you for bringing her back," he said.

Then, before the Mitchells could say goodbye to Rocinante, he grabbed her halter and led her into the trailer. In the meantime, Campbell told the boys to follow him and go in the back of a black buggy.

"I'll take you to the Avenue. Miss Young has planned to pick you up there," he told them.

A few moments later, as they were driving towards Burroughs, someone spoke in the vehicle's radio.

" _Alert to all units, Russel here! The Hell Storks have reached the river's aviary. I repeat, the Hell Stork are at the river's aviary!_ " Said an officer, one of those aboard the helicopters that went to pick up the group in the hills north of the Jungle Trading Post.

Campbell and his two passengers tuned pale.

The first because he knew that there were still civilians in this area and the latter because they thus learned about the quetzalcoatluses' escape.

The officer momentarily wanted to turn off the radio in order to avoid worrying the Mitchells more than necessary, but aware that they must had gone through some terrible ordeals in the jungle, he changed his mind, especially since the message was urgent.

" _They ... they're heading toward us…_ " Russel added, terrified.

Then followed a mixture of screams, half-strident half-booming calls, an engine's roar, and the sound of an alarm.

" _They're attacking! We're losing altitude!_ " He yelled over the cacophony. " _Please, someone help us!_ "


	71. To arms!

Uncontrollably spinning, the _JW-001_ touring helicopter came closer and closer to the top of dome and hit the mesh hard, creating a breach.

The helicopter, whose tail had broken on the impact, entered in the aviary, falling straight down towards the trees.

The passengers of the aircraft were definitely doomed but they weren't the only victims of the accident since in its fall, the helicopter sliced the cables of the gondola lift and the cabins, immobilised following the earthquake and still with passengers aboard for some, were pulled by the broken cable's pendular movement and crashed in the trees, in the river or worse, into an observation gallery where a certain number of the aviary's visitors had taken refuge.

The resident pterosaurs, also stressed because of the eruption, panicked and abandoned their eyries and feeding areas, all converging towards the breach before, once outside, scattering in every direction but the north, where the sky was roaring, and south, where some of their gigantic distant kin were pursuing the remaining two helicopters that were flying to Burroughs.  
The other quetzalcoatluses were already at the city's gates, so high in the sky that the only ones to be aware of their presence there were Hoskins and the control room's staff.

X

"Am I an idiot or they're heading toward us?" Hoskins had realised when he saw the dots corresponding to the first escaped pterosaurs rapidly advancing towards Burroughs on the real-time map, just before the touring helicopters were attacked.

Without losing a second, he had ordered:

"Bring everyone inside. To arms!"

He then turned to Harriman:

"What is the garrison's status?"

"Being prepared. They will be deployed in the city within ten minutes."

As the technicians were busy transmitting the instructions of the security division's director, Krill turned towards the place where Young had sat with her laptop to look at the pictures of the camera traps.  
While the computer had been left on the ground, its owner was gone.

"Where is Zara?" She asked.

"Claire's nephews arrived at the bridge a few moments ago. She left to pick them up at the visitors' infirmary," one of her colleagues told her.

"I didn't hear her leave," Cruthers admitted with a hint of guilt. "I would have told her to stay here."

The chief technician's gaze was drawn to the CCTV footage of Burroughs streets, showing the crowd of visitors, contained with difficulty by the employees, getting agitated.

"It's such a mess outside..." he added, worried.


	72. Pterosaurian Blitz

Led by Campbell, Zach et Gray were walking along the quay east of the pond.

They had returned to Burroughs by the northeast, using the tunnels that passed under the Zoo and allowed the staff to come and go between the East Docks, the Administration and Burroughs easier.

Having left it when it was waking up, the Mitchells saw the city in a state in which she had never been.  
With the two-tone alarm's sound echoing across the valley, Campbell's colleagues running here and there to extinguish the fires or rescue people trapped under rubble or furniture, and the visitors being gathered to be led to underground shelters, it was like being in the middle of the Blitz.  
The following message was broadcasted via the speakers in several languages:

" _Your attention dear visitors! For safety reasons, all park attractions are closed until further notice and must be evacuated. All visitors and unauthorized staff members must_ _calmly head to the nearest shelter and stay there until our staff_ _fix the situation. Thank you_."

When they arrived at the crossroads east of the Promenade, they saw that the visitors' infirmary was being evacuated.

"The earthquake has compromised a part of the infirmary and we have a fire at level -3 under the Grand Nublarian. Other fires broke out in the rest of the city. The guys are on their way to control them but they must act quickly if we don't want to stand in the middle of ruins at dawn." One of the J-SEC officers on the scene stated when Campbell asked him about the reasons behind the evacuation.

Campbell turned to the Mitchells.

"Please join other visitors," he told them.

"And Miss Young? She's supposed to meet us here," Zach reminded him.

"She too must head to a shelter. Don't worry about her. Go! I have much to do." The officer said coldly, almost chasing them away.

The Mitchells didn't insist and joined the flow of visitors that was progressing towards the entrance of Richard Owen Avenue.

Among the last to join the slowly advancing crowd, they ended up with two mounted grey guards behind them.  
Unlike Rocinante and the other horses seen in the Reserve, those of these riders wore protections on the legs and the neck, a sheet, and a visor, like those of the police during violent protests or riots.

In the area that encompassed Richard Owen Avenue and the Promenade, there were three entrances leading to the Depths and the shelters found there.  
Similar in appearance to entrances of metro stations, there was one at each end of the Promenade whereas the third was at the Obelisk plaza.  
As for the one closest to the crossroads, it had been blocked by rubble and so the visitors had to go further.

At the fountain with the four _Parasaurolophus_ busts, two J-SEC officers had been tasked with separating the coming flow in two parts, one going towards the entrance at the plaza and the other to the western end of the Promenade.

As the Mitchells had just entered the Avenue, an Emporium saleswoman hurried out of the shop to head to the nearest security officer.

"First everyone outside, now everyone underground. What the hell is going on?" She asked, confused and worked up.

"The Hell Storks," he answered laconically after making sure that no one was paying attention to their discussion. "They must be above us as we speak… Watch the skies…" he added grimly while looking at the clouds.

Not far away, one of the park keepers, a giant of a man with a thick black beard, looked at the speakers with irritation.

"We must turn off those damn sirens! Loud noises makes them go berserk!" He bellowed amidst the cacophony.

A few meters away, a group of visitors had stopped to observe the sky. One of them had his forefinger pointed at it, showing a vague dark shape moving fast between the clouds.

"What is this? Is it a plane?" A man wondered.

"A bird?" Suggested another.

"One thing is certain is that it's not Superman..." Added a woman.

Suddenly, the horses of the mounted guards began to stomp and one of them let out a nervous neigh while the mantellisaurs of a tram immobilised on the street and stilled hitched sought to remove their harnesses, pushing the crowd to move aside while the coachman vainly tried to calm them.

Looking up at the clouds, the visitors saw that the shape had descended lower and they could now see two large grey wings and a long pinkish neck.

The moment they realized the nature of the shape, there was a strident call behind them.

"Quetzal!" The black-bearded keeper yelled.

The pterosaur let out another sound, more booming, which strike the visitors with dread.

"Take cover!" A J-SEC officer shouted.

The horses kicked and when it reared up, one of them unseated its rider before fleeing, galloping between the visitors, knocking several down and even trampling another, leaving him badly injured.  
The mantellisaurs' panic increased and they pulled with all their strength on their harnesses.

A shadow passed rapidly over the crowd and looking up, it saw that a _Quetzalcoatlus_ was flying over it, almost brushing the rooftops, going from the northern end of the Avenue to the southern one before turning east, passing at a stone's throw from the Great Nublarian's balconies and describing an arc as it went back toward the Discovery Center, near which it was joined by two of its congeners, also coming from the north.

The three flying reptiles passed over the building and then dived towards the plaza and the avenue, swooping on the crowd, and like a herd surprised by predators, it was stricken with panic.

While some sought to rush to the entrance of the Depths, jostling or moving over each other during the process, the others turned around to flee the Avenue.  
Among those, Zach took Gray by the hand and told him to run towards the arcades on their left but once there, the other fleeing visitors forced them to go down the Avenue.

Looking towards the lagoons between the columns of the arcades, the Mitchells saw three other _Quetzalcoatlus_ , flying over the water in their direction, helping their congeners to make a pincer attack on the visitors.

The pterosaurs were on them in no time and four of them landed on the street in the middle of the crowd itself, brutally pushing people down during the process before starting to peck all around them, rapidly inflicting a number of lethal wounds.

Their foul stench struck everyone in their vicinity, even the Mitchells who were watching them from the arcade, horrified they were by the pterosaurs' repulsive look with the dried blood on their pycnofibers, their sickly-looking whitish eyes and their wrinkled and warty gular pouch; the fact that they were agile, fast and large at the same time, making them creatures from which it was almost impossible to escape if one was in the open; and their brutality, not hesitating to disembowel, impale or flaying their prey alive, in addition to rough them up in every way possible, catching them in their beak before repeatedly strike them against the ground or any other hard surface.

Moving as far away as possible from the carnage, Zach and Gray returned to the Promenade but chasing down other visitors, one of the _Quetzalcoatlus_ also headed there and blocked their path towards the western part of the Promenade and the shelter's entrance.

They heard two helicopters approaching Burroughs but soon after, the sounds produced by one of the aircrafts became irregular and Zach even thought that it was losing altitude, like if it was going to crash.  
The resounding of an explosion a few seconds later, coming from the plaza, confirmed his supposition.  
Another pterosaur landed shortly after in the middle of the eastern part of the Promenade.

While looking for a place to hide, a security officer hailed them.

"Don't stand here!" She shouted amid the screams.

But as soon as she finished her sentence, a large shadow passed over them and a beak closed around her torso and once she realized it, she was already some fifteen meters above the ground.

Having seen that the stream of people fleeing along the arcades had considerably diminished, Zach and Gray had rushed into a building and went to its first floor.  
Hidden behind a window's frame, they watched helplessly the officer being disputed between two _Quetzalcoatlus_.

Right in the middle of their quarrel, she fell straight down into one of the lagoons, the one of the mosasaur.

The boys didn't know if she was already dead or not. All they saw was one of the pterosaurs begin its descent to recover the body.

But just when its beak caught the latter, the gigantic and gaping jaws of the mosasaur breached the surface and closed around the beak, crushing it.

The _Quetzalcoatlus_ , under the shock of pain, shrieked and then began to drift in mid-air, quickly losing height before hitting the bay window of a shop and crashing inside it.

From their hiding place, the boys heard the sound of boots, those of a contingent of the Grey Guard, approaching from the west.

X

Preceding the two marauders of Brunet's platoon, about thirty foot soldiers were running. A part of the contingent was armed with firearms, the other with spears, not electrified but with an iron tip, like medieval or Antiquity's ones. Those guards were also carrying shields and all had sabres as a secondary or melee weapon.

Arrived at the fountain, the guards turned and at the entrance of the Avenue, they got in formation, deploying themselves on three packed lines where they were shoulders against shoulders. The marauders stopped, their cannons pointed at the opposite end of the Avenue.

Standing at the very centre of the first line, Brunet commanded the contingent.

"Shield wall!" He ordered before lowering the spear he was holding in his right hand and placing his shield in front of his torso.

Those of the same line made the same move in unison, locking their shields together, and those of the second line held their shields horizontally over their heads and projected their spears out over the first line.

Once the shield wall ready, Brunet exhorted the formation to advance.

"Forward!"

And the guards moved. In their advance, they regularly let out together a single cry, short, guttural and powerful, almost bestial; a scare tactic that was efficient against many opponents, including large predatory animals.

The quetzalcoatluses busy harassing the visitors then turned to the source of these cries and looking at the formation and the two marauders, they were confronted with one single entity: a wide and gigantic armoured monster, with many long and protruding teeth, a flattened snout, and two large rectangular eyes kept wide open.

Seeing it advancing toward them little by little, crawling on its countless legs and growling, they became confused and apprehensive. Instinctively, the pterosaurs moved back and the formation inexorably gained ground without encountering any resistance.

Taking advantage of this, the visitors still on the Avenue fled the street and passed through the arcades to run past by the guards or take shelter in the buildings that seemed still safe at the time.

When Brunet thought they had advanced far enough, he turned his head to the third row where Darbinian was. When her eyes met his, he nodded and she knew that it was up to her row to act.

"Shooters, mark your targets!" She ordered.

As the formation continued to advance slowly, Brunet waited a few seconds before starting to give the order to fire.

"Ready!..."

All the shields were lowered and the first two rows crouched down as the shooters on the third were ready to take aim.

"... Aim! ..."

The shooters pointed their weapons on the nearest quetzalcoatluses and prepared to press the trigger.

"…Fire!"

The bullets whistled across the Avenue and on the three pterosaurs targeted, one dropped dead immediately but the other two were only wounded since they had showed a greater reactivity than their dead congener, and they withdraw promptly out of reach or sight of the guards.

Having now reached the middle of the Avenue, the latter became emboldened because of the relative success of the first salvo.  
If they continued like this up to the plaza, fear would win the remaining quetzalcoatluses, making them flee.

 _Seven left…_ Durant thought while she was having a quick and nervous glance over her shield.

Within the shield wall, heat was increasing, threatening to become stifling, and the air was getting scarcer.

As less than thirty meters separated the formation from the edge of the plaza, one of the quetzalcoatluses wounded by the first salvo, having fled further before coming back to land on the roofs of the buildings on the western side of the Avenue, watched the contingent advance while being mostly concealed by the smoke.  
When the formation had to go around and pass a stopped tram and its team, the pterosaur could distinguish each of the men that made it.  
It then realized the trickery to which its eyes had been subjected and it laid its gaze upon of the most exposed guards, the one that operated the cannon of the nearest marauder.

He and the other guards looking straight ahead of them, they did not see it sliding down from the roof and leaping on the top of the tram, making the team's mantellisaurs letting out a loud call, before rushing in a flash to its prey, the beak wide open.

The guard screamed when he was grabbed but fortunately for him, his comrade inside the marauder, whose role was to reload the cannon between each shot, unsheathed his pistol and fired in the wings of the pterosaur.  
Its reflex action was to let him go and some of the spearmen turned to face and shout at him.  
Angry, the queztalcoatlus rushed forward to impale one of the men with its beak but at the last moment, he raised his shield over him and the beak struck it instead of his neck.

Behind the spearmen, another guard, armed with a shotgun, shot it in the chest a couple of times and fatally injured, the flying reptile collapsed on the ground and was speared.

Seeing their congeners falling one after the other, the quetzalcoatluses finally got scared and fled the guards, galloping towards the street that led to the pond. There, they took advantage of the slope to take off, running first on four limbs, then on two before leaping and beating their wings.

As they flew away, the guards, triumphant despite the defeat of their visual ploy, broke ranks and looked at the fleeing Hell Storks while roaring out of victory and brandishing their weapons.

Behind them, a large crowd had gathered and watched too the pterosaurs flying away with relief and hope. Some civilians were taunting the quetzalcoatluses while others cheered the guards for their bravery.

"Stay alert! The harpactognathus are still heading towards us. They will be here soon. Brace yourselves!" Brunet said to his subordinates.

His gaze was drawn by the burning helicopter in the eastern part of the plaza, the one the Hell Storks had made crash during the attack.  
It was releasing a thick smoke which, pushed by the wind, acted like a screen between the contingent and the tunnel that led to the zoo.

The employees told the visitors to head in a calm and orderly way either to the nearest Depths entrance, located just next to one of the stopped marauders, or to the Discovery Center in order to reach the lower rooms and halls.

While the civilians advanced in a long column, the guards reformed.  
Because of the cacophony made by the crowd, Brunet did not heard immediately his radio's sputterings.

Once far enough away from the crowd, he could hear someone trying to contact them and recognized Harriman's voice.

" _Get out of the plaza, dammit! They're coming!_ " The technician shouted in a distressed voice.

"What is..."

A loud crash coming from the tunnel that led to the Zoo caught the guards' attention.

Because of the black smoke released by the helicopter, they couldn't see what had just broken the gate, closed urgently in order to try to stop what was about to burst out of the tunnel.

The following moments happened like in slow-motion in the guards' minds.

Reaching them like distant echoes, there was first the screams of the visitors that were heading to the door of the Discovery Center, then the guards saw their column splitting, with one part rushing up the steps and another, bigger, fleeing in terror back to the Avenue.  
Behind them, the contingent saw a line of large frills appear amidst the smoke and the dread that stroke the guards at this very moment was the same felt by the Roman legionaries the first time they faced elephants on a battlefield, those of the army of Pyrrhus I, king of the Molossians, at Heraclea in 280 BC.

"Break ranks! Move aside!" Brunet yelled.

They barely had the time to hear him than five pachyrhinosaurs breached the smoke, bellowing in their advance and galloping straight towards Richard Owen Avenue.

During the earthquake, a tree had fallen across the fence of the pachyrhinosaurs' enclosure and disrupted the electric current's flow on an entire section but this, the ceratopsians only realized later, when the fear stirred up by two _Quetzalcoatlus_ flying over the enclosures was such that they agglutinated against the fence, pushing one of the individuals to touch the previously electrified wires and notice the absence of current, something that had surprised it since when they were younger, more than once they had touched them and received a slight electric shock, strong enough to prevent them from doing it again for a while.  
Thus, panic-stricken, the pachyrhinosaur had moved backwards in order to charge one of the fence's posts and after several attempts, managed to knock it down, creating a breach in which it and its congeners rushed. Not knowing where to go, they had ran through the Zoo, carving their way through thick vegetation or the chaos-ridden paths where a few other escaped animals were running between the last employees that were still there. They had left the Zoo by the path that joined the Obelisk Plaza, passing under the south-eastern ridge of the Discovery Center.  
For them, the guards and their vehicles were nothing but another obstacle on their way and to better pass through it, they lowered their heads and accelerated.

The guards then broke ranks and wanted to move away but for some in the centre of the formation, it was too late and the charge swept them like wisps of straw. Some were hurled in the air, one gored, others trampled and one of the marauders was even knocked down across the entrance of the Depths, blocking it.  
Drekanson, who was then in the middle of the formation, was one of those knocked down but by some miracle, the big legs of the pachyrhinosaurs only passed a few centimetres from his face and he remained still until they pass.

When he got up, he had the impression of having been struck by a train and as the ceratopsians reached the fountain at the other end of the Avenue, he turned towards it and was confronted to a horror vision.

Richard Owen Avenue was now nothing but knocked down stalls, decorations smashed into pieces that littered the street itself and the sidewalks, palm trees that had been uprooted or that leaned against the buildings and whose leaves had been set alight by the embers of the braziers projected here and there, and, amidst all this, lying and dislocated bodies by dozens.  
It quickly rang out with the wounded' moans.

The less serious injured among them sought to return under the arcades, limping or stumbling on the way, many holding a bloody arm or having a hand posed on their skull, others dragging a broken leg. The most serious were agonising on the ground.  
On each side, black smoke rose from the buildings and a crackling was perceptible: the minor fires, which, without the attack of the quetzalcoatluses, would have been controlled, had gained in extend and now threatened to consume the whole area.

As he joined his colleagues, they suddenly turned, having heard cawing sounds in the skies.

The ash cloud had just passed over the Rio Iris and was still being pushed southwards.  
In any second, darkness was going to fall upon the city. But it wasn't the worst thing since preceding it, there were the remaining six _Quetzalcoatlus_ along with the _Harpactognathus_ ' swarm.

When the pterosaurs arrived near the Discovery Center, they dived towards the burning city.


	73. Shadow and Water

Like crows on a battlefield, they landed among the bodies and began to eat the dead or the dying, or worse, as they had become frenzied, to attack those spared by the pachyrhinosaurs' charge and the previous attack.  
One of the _Harpactognathus_ however, entered in the _Winston_ 's to raid the kitchen where meat was still grilling.

The guards, barely recovering from the charge who had neutralised a fifth of their force, regrouped and drove the harpactognathus out of the plaza.  
But they were only confronted to a dozen of individuals since when it arrived in Burroughs, the swarm had scattered in formations all across the northern part of the city. Brunet then decided to disperse his men in order to protect the civilians from the rampaging animals, help the keepers neutralise the latter and the J-SEC in leading the visitors to the shelters.

"Darbinian, take some shooters with you and go on the roofs. Temba, take half of the remaining men and hold the plaza," he said to one of the riders, a South African. "The other half with me and Leif, we have to save those we can. Durant, Velasquez, go defend the door!"

The two recruits nodded and took positions in front of the Discovery Center's bronze door, helping there the J-SEC officers to bring the civilians inside.

While Darbinian and four other shooters were already climbing the walls in order to reach the roofs and the towers, and Temba and those in charge of defending the plaza setting up a security perimeter, the remaining guards in fighting condition, a little less than fifteen, split into two groups: One, led by Brunet and Cole headed to the Avenue, and the other, led by Drekanson and Maathai, hastened to join the quays bordering the night show's pond.

On the way, the two groups saw that the pachyrhinosaurs had stopped running but that lost and frightened by the pterosaurs, their panic had turned into a destructive madness and they were attacking everything that was moving around them, humans, flying reptiles but also the horses and the mantellisaurs.

Seeing Darbinian and those with her within earshot, running on the roofs towards shooting positions, Brunet shouted at them:

"The pachys! Kill the pachys!"

Killing an adult pachyrhinosaur in such circumstances was not an easy task and most would have even agreed that without the cannons and the big steel bolts, it would have been almost impossible.  
Arrows and many types of bullets were inefficient against their hard hide and the only kind of ammunition that could cause any significant damage were those of a calibre identical or higher than that of an elephant gun while the horses were so frightened by them that even the most skilled riders couldn't have approached enough to deliver fatal blows or shots.  
Without a heavy weapon, the only way to kill a pachyrhinosaur was to shoot in the eye in order to hit the brain, which meant that the shooter had to stand in front of it while the animal was charging him or her.

Seeing some of her group's members waste their ammunition on the ceratopsians, Darbinian instead ordered them to aim at the pterosaurs and Brunet asked in his microphone to the remaining marauder to come to the Avenue and take care of the pachyrhinosaurs.

X

Meanwhile, Velasquez and Durant were helping the civilians and the wounded to reach the safety of the Center.

Despite the desperate situation and the shock of the Indominus' ambush, Durant kept going and remained focused. Her sense of duty was stronger and demanded her to show courage in front of those defenceless people.  
She had to be strong for them.

Among the arriving people, they glimpsed a familiar limping figure.

Like all other unauthorized employees, Lambert Ross had been asked to evacuate his workplace and to head for one of the shelters alongside the visitors but the quetzalcoatluses' first attack followed by the pachyrhinosaur's charge had reduced to nothing the efforts made to organize a proper evacuation and among the fugitives, there were even some of the security officers tasked with supervising said evacuation.

As they had crossed half the distance between the obelisk and the steps, some within the group of visitors that was ahead of him suddenly stopped to point something way above the door of the Center.

"Up there! Watch out!" One of them shouted.

Durant and Velasquez raised their heads and among the line of pterosaur statues crowning the entrance's facade, they saw three _Harpactognathus_ , watching with great interest the fleeing people converging towards the building.

Since their likeness to the statues and the declining light because of the cloud passing over the city, so thick that it blocked sunlight, no one had seen them earlier and quickly they laid their eyes upon the slowest and, apparently, the weakest of their potential prey: Ross.

They leapt in the air and swooped on the innkeeper. The latter, having seen the threat, took a knocked down stroller near his feet and brandished it with both hands, ready to face his attackers.  
Using it to strike them, he defended himself valiantly for a moment before a bite on his arm almost made him yield. It was then that Durant drew her sabre and rushed to his rescue.

She struck a fatal blow to the _Harpactognathus_ which turned away from Ross first to attack her instead, sliced off another's wing and finally, defeated the third by thrusting her blade in its throat.  
Blood squirted on her face and when it collapsed against her, Durant pushed the body away and stood there for a moment, looking dazed, gasping while her limbs were shaking and adrenaline still rushing through her body. Ross have her a grateful look.

Durant regained her concentration and looked back to the door of the Center.

"Quick, upstairs!" She said to the innkeeper.

She wiped the blood on her mouth with the back of her hand and, following him backwards, returned to the steps.

X

Zach and Gray had narrowly avoided being part of the charge's victims.  
At the last moment, they had sheltered with others behind the same tram on which one of the quetzalcoatlus had leapt before attacking the Guard contingent and whose team of two mantellisaurs had managed to escape just before the charge, derailing slightly the vehicle in the process.  
The first of the pachyrhinosaurs to take the Avenue, knocking down the people on his way like a bowling ball striking pins, had headed towards the west sidewalk and hit the tram head-on out of inattention, making it turn towards the middle of the street, but the second animal, whose sight had been obstructed by the moving crowd in front of him, had also hit the vehicle hard, making it turn even more. It had ended up perpendicular to the street with its front part resting on the sidewalk, forcing all along Zach, Gray and those with them to follow the tram's movements in order to avoid being crushed.  
Thus, the other pachyrhinosaurus, unable to pass through the space left between the tram and the west arcade, were forced to pass either in the middle of the latter or on the east side of the Avenue.  
The tram also lost its stability because of the first two hits and when it was hit a third time, it had tumbled and the Mitchells had ended with the roof in their backs.  
When they had wanted to leave their shelter, after that the pachyrhinosaurs had turned left at the end of the Avenue, the quetzalcoatluses had returned, along with their former aviarymates. Their arrival had forced the small group to seek refuge in the nearest building, a restaurant where they had hidden behind the walls or under the tables.

A minute or two elapsed during which they stayed that way, until some harpactognathuses entered in the restaurant through a broken window and, attracted by the food left on the plates, started to walk in the aisles, jumping on the tables from time to time to feed on a sausage or a piece of steak. Sometimes they knocked over the places settings, making the humans hidden a few meters away start.  
Worked up, some began to sob, attracting the black-faced pterosaurs which found them.

In the commotion that followed, tables were knocked down, the furniture ravaged, and plates of food and knives flew in the direction of the harpactognathuses. Zach and Gray were separated from the others during it and when they left the restaurant by the entrance and crossed the arcade, they ended up between two pachyrhinosaurs.

They had become enraged and the one on their right didn't stopped bellowing as he tried to charge between the columns of the arcade in order to reach some visitors huddled against a wall.  
At one point, he gave up and disappeared behind the Emporium.  
For his part, the other was facing a group of guards.

As they passed fast behind the ceratopsian, Gray saw what was behind the soldiers.

"Zach!" He suddenly yelled.

Before the latter could see what was threatened him, his brother pulled him by the arm to the side and at the same time, the pachyrhinosaur moved to the right, revealing the marauder which was standing at the upper end of the Avenue, its cannon pointed straight in their direction.

He heard an object pass by him and so fast that it whistled in his ear

Suddenly, Zach felt a sharp, burning sensation on his left cheek that made him groan in pain.  
Reflexively, he put a hand on it and felt blood flowing along a cut half a dozen of centimetres long.  
His brother had saved him from a giant bolt, whose barbed tip had just scraped the young man's cheek. The projectile meanwhile, had continued its trajectory to thrust itself in the barrier reef between the mosasaur's lagoon and Hell Aquarium.

As they stood in the middle of the street still realizing that Zach had almost been killed by the guards, one of the flying quetzalcoatluses spotted them amidst the surrounding confusion and decided to hunt them.

Seeing behind the smoke a great shadow descending towards them from the north of the Avenue, Zach and Gray once again scurried towards the Promenade. The flying reptile rapidly emerged from the smoke, and began to fly low, catching up with them at a tremendous speed without caring at all for all those under its path, forcing them to crouch down.  
It gave the brothers an idea.

When the pterosaur opened its beak to catch Gray, he and his brother jumped to the side.

The flying reptile, hampered by its own size and not having the same maneuvering abilities in the air as a bird, had no choice but to continue straight and regain altitude before turning to start a new attempt.

But just as it was about to dive again, two arrows pierced its chest, one of them right in the heart.

Zach looked towards the top of one of the nearby rooftops and saw one of the guards there, a slender woman with black hairs, pointing her bow toward the pterosaur.

The _Quetzalcoatlus_ moved back and once it was high above the Avenue, it began to gradually lose control of its motor functions.

When it could no longer fly, the pterosaur let out a desperate scream that was silenced in a gasp.

Then, its body fell and crashed into the thatched roof of a tower on the eastern side of the Avenue.

X

Darbinian watched the pterosaur slide and fall on the street before being surprised by the sound of rotating blades and an engine's roar.

Looking at the sky, she saw the last touring helicopter of tourism quickly losing altitude while spinning.

The pterosaurs had also make this aircraft crash and it was plummeting towards the surface of one of the closest lagoons.

As soon as the helicopter hit the surface and began to sink slowly, Darbinian's attention was drawn to a series of human screams, coming from the Promenade.

Wanting to know what was causing these people to scream, she climbed up to the top of the roof and from there, she saw, amidst the smoke, that a pachryhinosaur was about to push one of the trams into the Hell's Aquarium lagoon next to which it had been stopped.  
Its team had been freed earlier by some keepers but the tram itself was filled with visitors that had taken refuge there but who had been then cornered by the mad ceratopsian and terrorised, they didn't dared to leave the vehicle.

Darbinian would have rushed to their help and scream to her comrades to shoot the pachyrhinosaur but she realised it was too late and the vehicle tumbled a moment later.

Looking away from this tragic scene among so many others, she decided instead to go save those she could.

X

As the tram was sinking rapidly because of its weight, those inside hurried to swim out of it but as soon as they raised their heads out of the water, a _Harpactognathus_ formation came to harass them, biting arms and heads or clawing scalps, and several of the pterosaurs tried to grab together, not without trouble, a visitor or two to take them out of the lagoon.

While the tumult that it provoked attracted the attention of the lagoon's dwellers, those whom the harpactognathuses weren't attacking began to look for a way out.  
Seeing no ladder from their position, they were struck by despair and some shouted for help.

Slender shadows, those of the small mosasaurids and the predatory fishes that lived there, passed a few meters beneath them, and some even felt something graze their feet or a calf.  
Nearby, the top of dorsal or caudal fins began to breach the surface.

Suddenly, one of the visitors opened his mouth wide like if he wanted to scream but before he could do that, he disappeared under the water.

As he wasn't in the field of vision of anyone, the others noticed its disappearance too late and it was only when a small mosasaur, as long as a full grow Nile crocodile and with a black-striped pale grey skin - a _Platecarpus_ \- surfaced to grab one of the tram's passengers by the throat that they realized how much of a deadly trap the lagoon was.

Excited by the scent of blood, the predators rushed on the visitors with great ferocity and instead of sharing them, each took a prey and dragged it under water.

Only one young woman managed to reach the reef barrier.  
She tried to grab onto the false corals in order to climb but in vain, as the structure was too slippery.

One of the _Harpactognathus_ saw her despair and flew to her, but just after he began to bite her right arm, a subadult _Platecarpus_ closed its jaws on her leg.  
Pulling on it, the mosasaur dragged the young woman underwater as she had her grazed right arm raised, with her hand wide open while she was screaming and swallowing water at the same time.

From the safety of the tunnel within the reef barrier that separated Hell's Aquarium from the Mosasaur's lagoon, other visitors that were fleeing towards Mount Thetis could not help but to watch horrified this carnage happening in the middle of a cloud of blood that grew and grew until it concealed the scene.

X

On the other side of the same barrier reef, the touring helicopter continued to sink to the depths.

Water had infiltrated inside and had already half submerged the cabin, threatening to drown the passengers and the pilot if they didn't leave the aircraft.

At first, they managed to agree not without trouble, as some feared what was in the lagoon even though they didn't knew exactly where they had crashed, on the decision to open the door and swim to the surface but at the very moment they went to slide the door, the man who had his handle froze out of terror.

Through the window, he saw the mosasaur emerge from the depths and slowly swim towards them.

Underwater, no one could heard them scream.

The mosasaur first swam around the helicopter, describing increasingly smaller circles, and then, as she had noticed that this entity wasn't aggressive, she approached her head to investigate the aircraft with great curiosity.

When her huge, round and dark pupil met the eyes of each of the passengers, horror struck them.  
Some were aware that the mosasaur was probably thinking that they were some kind of new form of enrichment and that she was expected to, not unlike an otter which had to find a solution to reach a piece of food contained in a small block of ice, find a way to open the helicopter in order to access to the "reward" they were.

Thus, she started to touch the aircraft with the tip of her snout before biting it, tearing pieces of metal.  
Noting that this would soon become laborious, the mosasaur stopped doing this and changed her strategy.

She swam away to the other end of the lagoon before returning at full speed and hit sideways the helicopter. Seeing that the only effect of this action was to accelerate the speed at which the aircraft was sinking, the marine squamate opted for another technique.

Pushing the helicopter with her snout, she carried it to the barrier reef and smashed it against the latter.

The barrier being actually made of concrete, the impact tore the sheets of metal and broke many pieces, allowing water to enter en masse inside the helicopter and finish submerging the cabin.  
In her attempt to open the aircraft, the mosasaur scraped it down to the nearest bay window.

Although the latter had been designed to retain a large volume of water, it was put to the test by the repetitive attacks of the reptile on the helicopter that affected it indirectly and at one moment, cracks, small ones at the beginning, started to appear, letting a few drops fall in the tunnel.  
But the more the mosasaur attacked the helicopter, moving her snout inside the cabin, the more the cracks extended under the terrified gaze of the people in the tunnel. Water infiltrated by thin trickles, then by small waterfalls and finally by full spurts. Then came the moment when the window broke and a roaring flood of saltwater entered in the tunnel.

In a matter of seconds, its entirety was submerged and many of those who were there were violently carried away to the nearby galleries, threatened with submersion in their turn.  
If the flood wasn't stopped, a large part of the Depths, including the rooms and halls of Mount Thetis, would be submerged and hundreds of people doomed to drown.

Although the park's designers had thought that this kind of situation was unlikely to happen, Jurassic World engineers had nevertheless considered its eventuality and integrated a security protocol into the park's systems that aimed to isolate a compromised room or tunnel with heavy doors that closed automatically when a high-risk flood was detected.  
Despite their foresight on this matter, they had underestimated one of the parameters that was the evacuation speed.

Thus, when the doors were activated after the amount of time written in the program, they closed as visitors continued to flock out of the tunnel, now illuminated by an oppressive reddish subdued light and no longer by the soothing bluish dim light of the seabed.

Trapped, they began to pound on the doors, looking desperately through their porthole, trying to be seen by the CCTV cameras of the neighbouring rooms.

X

"People are drowning in the TN tunnel," One of the technicians stated in an alarmed tone. "I'm going to try override the system in order to unlock the doors," He added while frantically tapping his fingers on the keyboard, starting to enter passwords and write queries.

"Do it and water will spread through the nearby rooms and tunnels. The situation of the breaches in the walls of Mount Thetis will get worse." One of his colleagues dissuaded him. "There are now more than five hundred people there and nearly two thousand in the rest of the Depths!"

The two began to argue virulently, the former appealing to compassion and the latter to pragmatism, showing the other multiple reports of pressurization anomalies and diagrams showing some rooms in the Depths blinking red.

Looking helplessly at the footage from the streets of Burroughs or from the lagoons and showing the park's creatures spreading death and desolation, Masrani was utterly aghast and hiding under his hand the tears that were running down his face.

A few steps away from him, Cruthers was suddenly drawn to one of the CCTV footage on his workstation's screen, showing the atrium of the administration building and some winged creatures moving there, leaping towards the nearest employees.

"Harpactognathuses are in the Atrium!" He warned everyone.

Hoskins immediately turned to him.

"Send some officers there!"

The director of the security division then leaped behind Cruther's workstation.

"How did they enter?" He asked.

The chief technician told him that the pterosaurs had entered in the Administration through the gaping breach left by the earthquake in the rooms closest to the end of the promontory.

"All officers are busy elsewhere," Harriman told him. "Well, all except Oraka and Kelly," he added, glancing at the two officers guarding the entrance of the room.

Hoskins thought for a moment, then a resolute look appeared on his serious face.

"Mr Cruthers and Mr Harriman. I leave you in command while I take care of this."

Before leaving, he leaned over Cruthers and Krill.

"Keep an eye on him," he whispered, speaking of Masrani.

He left the control room.

"With me!" He said to the two officers.

One of them passed a handgun to Hoskins and they ran down the hallways, heading for the Atrium from where screams reached them.


	74. Saint George

Distanced by the harpactognathuses somewhere in the middle of the Central Fields, Dearing and Grady had continued to drive to Burroughs despite this. They first had turned east, leaving the Reserve not far from the Cartago's aviary before taking the road that went down the cliffs south of it, then a bridge over the Rio Iris further south and finally the network of underground roads under the Zoo.

They came out of said network at a small parking lot north of the night show's bleachers. They left their vehicle there and took the path that led the pond while screams came from Burroughs.

They hadn't even reached the end of the path when a mantellisaur passed in front of them. The animal, still wearing its harness, didn't pay attention to them and disappeared immediately in the dense vegetation, running away from the city.

Reaching the base of the bleachers, Dearing and Grady started to trot towards the crossroads and the visitors' infirmary, passing by some visitors and employees that were also fleeing the city.

As they had passed two-thirds of the bleachers, a group of visitors ran out of the multiplex and like if it was chasing them from the building, a pachyrhinosaur came out in its turn by the great breach it had made by ramming the large bay window of the entrance hall.

The group headed for the base of the bleachers and running after them, the ceratopsian ended up charging towards Dearing and Grady.

"The bleachers! Quickly!" The latter said to his companion.

The herbivore crossed the hundred and fifty meters that separated them from it in less than ten seconds, forcing some of the people on the way to jump in the pond.  
Thus, Dearing and Grady had barely reached the third row of seats that the pachyrhinosaur charged the first two rows in full force, projecting seats all around.  
In its attack, it tried to reach the two companions but the stands considerably impeding its advance, it gave up.  
The pachyrhinosaur preventing them from reaching the infirmary by the quay, they decided to make a detour by the Grand Nublarian's hanging gardens.

After progressing among those for a while, hiding in the bushes or dense groves each time that pterosaurs flew nearby, they reached a small gazebo that overlooked west.

From there, they had a view on the Promenade, Richard Owen Avenue and the Obelisk Plaza, as well as on the chaos that had struck the city.  
The entire valley echoed with screams. Where people once laughed, they were now crying; where children once played, adults were fighting for their lives; where they once ate, they were eaten…  
In the sky, a few of the quetzalcoatluses were circling over Burroughs, looking for some easy prey and sometimes avoided the bolts fired by the marauder. One of those had already taken one of them, hit in the chest, and its body has crashed down into one of the houses in the eastern residential district.

At one moment, Dearing and Grady saw one of the Hell Storks flew vertically, holding a guard in its beak, and once it was high enough, the pterosaur let its prey fall to their surprise. The guard fell for long seconds before another _Quetzalcoatlus_ arrived to impale him on the tip of its beak.  
The pterosaur then went to the congener which had let the guard fall, described an arc over it and made its victim slid along its beak, letting him fall. The guard was once again caught mid-air, being the object of a macabre game between the two giant pterosaurs for long moments. The more he watched the scene, the more Grady thought that it looked like some form of courtship.  
After a while, the two animals abandoned their victim, leaving his shredded body fall straight towards the tiles of one of the apartment block of the western residential district.

In the north, the Sibo was still rumbling and one could sometimes felt the earthquake's aftershocks.  
Beyond the summit of the Southern Plateau, they could manage to distinguish the declining daylight. Since the cloud emitted by the Sibo was mostly pushed to the south and the east, the western part of the island hadn't passed under its shadow and the sun was still illuminating it while darkness had fallen upon Burroughs.

Dearing's gaze turned to the visitors' infirmary, which was on fire.

"The infirmary," she pointed in a stressed voice, hoping that those inside had been evacuated.

"Claire!"

Grady showed her a small formation of harpactognathuses that was flying straight in their direction from the south. They had been spotted.

"The _Chicxulub_!" She exclaimed, naming their nearest way-out.

The roof terrace of the night club was a dozen of meters from the gazebo, below a stone wall covered with creepers.

They then rushed in that direction, jumping off the wall before heading for the staircase leading to the night club's main room and ran down its steps as the pterosaurs landed.

When they arrived at the stairs' base, they slammed the door in the snouts of the harpactognathuses that had leapt to catch them. They heard them crash against the door and not waiting for them to find a way to open the door, Dearing went to get a small table that could be put against it while Grady had his back against it, preventing it from moving.

Once the table was positioned to block the door's opening, the two turned to the heart of the large room, that had the particularity of having a screen on the ceiling that showed small asteroids continuously falling in the middle of a starry night sky, preceding a bigger one that was approaching inexorably while a Cretaceous forest had been painted on the walls, giving the impression to the patrons of partying on the eve of the apocalypse that had killed the non-avian dinosaurs more than sixty-five million years ago.  
During the night club's opening hours, conducts all around the room released a fog that gave the place a disturbing atmosphere, just like the fake dinosaur bones here and there. Thick ferns completed the scenery.

To reach the front door, Dearing and Grady first had to go down a few steps to the dance floor, cross it and then climb a few steps to the platform opposite of them and by which one could enter in the club by the quay.

While the only sounds that had been heard so far were those of their footsteps on the dance floor, they heard some chairs' feet scrape on the floor of one of the platforms that overlooked them.  
Something had make them move but the prevailing dim light prevented them from seeing what. They weren't alone in the Chicxulub.  
No matter what it was, they had no reason to linger there and Grady told Dearing to hurry.

Letting her distance him a few steps, he had a last glance at the platform where the chairs had moved.  
He didn't see anything.

But when he looked back at Dearing, his ears perceived a low but distinct sound, the one of claws scraping the floor.

Realizing that the animal to which they belonged was moving quickly, he pivoted, just in time to see a _Harpactognathus_ gliding towards him but before he could react, the pterosaur knocked him down and landed on top of him.

Caught off-guard, Grady had dropped his rifle during the attack and he couldn't reach his knife either since the reptile was snapping at his face, forcing the keeper to maintain its head at a certain distance with both hands.

"Back off, you faggot!" Grady roared while strangling the reptile.

But it was then that Dearing grabbed the rifle and struck the pterosaur's head with the butt, almost knocking it unconscious, and while it was recovering from the blow and yelping, the director hurried to take aim. Just as the reptile was about to respond, she shot it in the chest three times. Although the first shot was fatal, she had feared that it wasn't the case and had mechanically pull the trigger again.

When the pterosaur let out its last breath, Dearing relaxed and had the sudden urge to let out a nervous laugh in the heat of the action. Despite all the years that had flew since the last of her rifle shooting competitions, she still knew how to handle a rifle.

"Groovy…" Grady couldn't help but to let out.

Dearing's gaze crossed his and she noticed that he was looking at her with a certain barely-masked admiration.

She reached out and helped him up.

"Thank you," he said.

They exchanged an intense look and if the situation wasn't so urgent, he was sure that he would have kissed her on the spot.

The shouts and screams outside reminded them that they were racing against the clock and they left the nightclub.

Under the Casino's porch, they found one of the guards, protecting the group of civilians who had massed behind him. He waved them to come and they joined him.

"Where are the infirmary's patients?" Dearing hastened to ask.

"The J-SEC had evacuated them after the earthquake. They had to be among the crowd on the Avenue when the Hell Storks began their attack. Then, it was nothing but chaos… Your nephews can be anywhere now. I hope for them and for you that they didn't stay at the Avenue. It's Stalingrad there!"

"I'm afraid they're still there," Grady said. "Thank you. Hold on!"

Before the guard could dissuade them to go there, Dearing and Grady rushed to the quay on the southern side of the pond and ran past the shops situated there while above them, a pachyrhinosaur was rampaging through the gardens and the patios. Meanwhile, the flames were spreading northward.

X

Refuged with other visitors in a shop whose entrance was twenty meters from the northern end of the Avenue, Zach and Gray watched the chaos outside.

In front of the shop, a guard armed with a sabre and wearing a shield was facing two Harpactognathus and their fight prevented the survivors from leaving the building. As its outcome seemed uncertain, some began to cough because of a nearby fire's smoke which was starting to arrive abundantly.

"The fire is getting closer," one of the survivors pointed out between two coughing fits. "We're going to suffocate or burn alive if we don't get the hell out of here…"

As oxygen was getting scarcer in the shop, the group watched the opponents continue their fight.

Once the guard triumphed over the pterosaurs, someone shouted and they came out of the shop, bowed by their coughing, passed behind the guard and turned to their right, running at full speed in the arcade.

Looking back, one of the survivors noticed that the guards were losing ground but at the obelisk's plaza, the situation wasn't much better.

A pachyrhinosaur had smashed the defensive perimeter and was now fighting a group of infantrymen.  
While spearmen were keeping it at bay, the shooters struggled to find a favourable firing angle.  
Nearby, a rider was grappling with a _Quetzalcoatlus_ , spearing the pterosaur's beak or neck each time it tried to impale him or his horse.  
But the door of the Discovery Center, through which people continuously rushed, was in sight and as long as they were defended, they had to try their luck and cross the plaza.  
A mighty bellow increased their stress.

The pachyrhinosaur was now standing on its hind legs and, after letting out a growl, it made a few steps forward and its fore legs slammed the shields of the spearmen, flattening them on the ground.

Before the rest of its opponents could move back, the ceratopsian violently knocked them over with a sweeping move of its frill and moved towards one of the shooters, its beak wide open.

It close it on the shooter's arm and as the guard was screaming in pain while trying to stab the pachyrhinosaur in the eyes, the latter shook him in all directions, twisting and dislocating the arm during the process before breaking it in two but suddenly, it released its victim, yelped and backed off abruptly: Before falling unconscious, the guard had managed to stab its right eye.

While the pain paralyzed the pachyrhinosaur on the spot, the survivors took the opportunity to rush to the gates but as they run, they saw late the _Quetzalcoatlus_ fought by the rider being chased by the latter towards the Avenue. The pterosaur passed in the middle of the group on the way in addition to take in its beak the man who was in front of Gray. For his part, the rider had to pull firmly on his horse's reins in order to not hit the group with his mount and the horse reared a little before turning to go around them.

They looked back at the door and saw their way of salvation was blocked by the one-eyed pachyrhinosaur.

Its wound had aggravated its berserk state and in the meantime, it had made its way through the fleeing people by taking one of the ramps that led to the top of the platform.  
The two guards who defended the door had been caught off-guard and while one, an American young woman, had taken refuge in the vestibule, the other, a Costa Rican man about the same age as his colleague, had ended up trapped outside between the pachyrhinosaur and the fleeing people.

Zach and Gray's group glanced at the rest of the building's facade.  
They couldn't either pass by the glass doors leading to the IMAX dome's queue and the center's shop since while a pile of rubble obstructed the second, the opening system of the first had been damaged and the door could only open for a few centimetres before blocking itself. Although their attempts hadn't yet showed any encouraging result, some visitors and employees were trying to break the windows with stones.

At the top of the steps, the pachyrhinosaur bellowed and reared up, as if to prepare to trample the helpless guard that stood in front of him, but it was suddenly silenced when a great steel bolt pierced its chest, thrusting itself right into the vital organs.

While the marauder's cannon was reloaded near the plaza's rim, the guard told the civilians to move aside but the ceratopsian, still alive, put its forelegs back on the ground and with a wheezing breathing, advanced a few feet towards the stairs and let out another bellow, more plaintive than threatening, before receiving another bolt between the ribs.

The animal staggered, collapsed on its right side and hurtled down the steps. There, a guard rushed to it immediately to put an end to its sufferings. He pointed his rifle to the eye and shoot.  
Just before he pulled the trigger, adults made the children in the vicinity look away or covered their eyes but the mere sounds of the pachyrhinosaur letting out its last breath and the weapon's firing were enough to terrify them.  
Despite what the pachyrhinosaur had done, few were those who weren't saddened by its death because the scene summed up the tragedy of the events that struck Jurassic World.

Now, its body stood in the way and blocked a large part of the steps and those who intended to reach the door by them had to climb over this new obstacle, that another body on which one stumbled in his or her escape.

The way being finally secured, the group rushed toward the door while the guards tasked with the defence of the plaza reorganized not without difficulty and the rider who had chased the _Quetzalcoatlus_ sent one of them, a slender and muscled Frenchman in his mid-thirties, in the Avenue to inform their comrades about the evolution of the situation at this level.

After a quick climb over the pachyrhinosaur's body, the Mitchells and their group passed between the two guards that were firmly holding their position on the platform and finally crossed the threshold of the door, following the other civilians to the rotunda.

There, a security officer was pointing the direction to follow and shouting:

"To the lower levels! Go to the lower levels!"

As they headed for the stairs, they saw a ranked J-SEC officer castigating two subordinates who had abandoned their posts. Both shown punch marks.

"Go back to your posts you scumbags! If I ever find you hiding again, I swear that it will be with two bullets in the back that you will leave this island, you damned rats!"

Something broke through a window at the same time.

"Pterosaurs are in the building!" Shouted the officer in the Rotunda.

The harpactognathuses' croaky calls echoed in the corridors and halls.

X

Running in the middle of the western arcade to avoid advancing in the open, Corporal Vincent Chapuy was heading towards the southern end of the Avenue.  
Sent by Temba after the death of the pachyrhinosaur, he was looking for Lieutenant Brunet.

During his progression, he looked inside each of the buildings he passed by. Some, those which generally offered not a lot of hiding places, were empty and in others, conversely very furnished, there were still many terrorised civilians who didn't dare to go out despite the threat of the nearby fires.

"Get out! Get out while there is still time!" He yelled at them.

While some complied, others decided to stay.  
But Chapuy had to find Brunet as soon as possible and reluctantly not insisting, he continued.

After descending two-thirds of the Avenue, he finally found Brunet.

The latter was standing on the doorstep of one of the restaurants, ready to order a part of his team to escort a group of about fifty civilians they had gathered in the main dining room.  
The establishment was one of the buildings in this part of the Avenue that resisted the fires best.  
Thus, while the flames were just beginning to lap the furniture on the upper floor, the nearby buildings were burning.

Chapuy hailed his senior officer in French:

" _Lieutenant!_ "

" _Oui caporal Chapuy?_ "

" _La place est compromise. Le pachy a neutralisé une trop grande partie de notre équipe. Ce qui reste ne pourra plus tenir encore très longtemps._ "

" _Bon sang! Drekanson et Maathai sont occupés à défendre ceux dans le Casino et nous menaçons d'être à court de munitions de notre côté._ "

Brunet turned towards the street and while some were keeping the animals at bay, he scanned the trail of lifeless bodies and his gaze stopped on the fallen guards, J-SEC officers and keepers.

Screams attracted his attention: The harpactognathuses had gathered in sufficient numbers and threatened to overwhelm the guards supposed to cover them while they evacuated the group of civilians.

"We are losing the streets..." he added in English.

Other screams echoed from further down the avenue, screams of terror, uttered by visitors trapped in a building ablaze, located just opposite of the Emporium. A few meters from it, two _Quetzalcoatlus_ waited with a puzzling tranquillity, like if the smoke didn't bothered them and that they intended to let the humans burn alive and feast on their roasted flesh later, once the building would have collapsed and that the fires' intensity would have considerably decreased.

"Prepare to sound the retreat," Brunet ordered to Chapuy.

Chapuy gave him a brief uncertain look and then grabbed the horn he was carrying over the shoulder.

But as he was about to blow in it, a huge hand grabbed his wrist, stopping him from doing so. Chapuy saw Maleko Cole's face, unprotected since the loss of his helmet during the chaos, giving him an insistent look.

"And about these people?" The Hawaiian asked, turning towards Brunet and speaking of the screams coming from the ablaze building.

"The men are wavering. If we do not fall back, they will rout and it will be in vain that we would have fought because there will no one left to defend the City or what will remain of it after that!" Brunet replied coldly.

He grabbed Cole's arm, making him release Chapuy and he looked him straight in the eyes.

"We can't save everyone," he said in a stern voice that couldn't hide however traces of remorse.

Still holding Cole by the arm, Brunet nodded to Chapuy and as the latter repeatedly blew the horn, he came back inside the restaurant:

"Fall back!" He shouted to his men.

While some escorted the group of civilians as originally planned, the others covered this retreat, firing at the harpactognathuses that were chasing them.

Along the way, they were joined by Darbinian and the shooters who had climbed on the rooftops.  
Two of them had perished, one pushed from a roof during a pterosaur attack, and the other was the victim with whom the two _Quetzalcoatlus_ seen by Dearing and Grady had played.

Thus, Brunet's team and the shooters led by Darbinian managed to join Temba's remaining men by the obelisk.

There, Brunet saw that there were only fourteen men still in fighting condition on their side, himself included, and he was aware that were others left on Drekanson's team side. However, since they had heard the horn sounding the retreat, they must had preferred to entrench themselves in the Great Nublarian and wait for reinforcements. Hearing a heavy and continuous rumble coming from the Avenue, Brunet knew that they had taken the most judicious decision since a huge crowd had formed and was converging towards the center's door.

Seeing the guards falling back and fearing to be left outside, the survivors still massed in the buildings had left those to rush to the door before its closing.  
In no time, hundreds of them were covering the avenue and running towards the steps, charging like a stampeding herd. Some stumbled on the bodies lying across their path while pterosaurs were harassing the slower ones.  
The crowd was so panicked that the guards no longer had any hope of getting it under control without resorting to force, and they soon observed that many of the fleeing had abandoned all notions of public-spiritedness, caring only for their own skin and leaving others to their own fate.  
Those who had the misfortune to fall were trampled by those who were just behind them in the utmost indifference and desiring to hide at all costs, a group stormed the marauder.  
The gunner shouted at them to back off but their relentlessness didn't diminish in the least and when he decided to unsheathe his pistol to threaten them as he was overwhelmed, arms grabbed him and he was dragged down to the crowd.

Being separated from their colleague by the latter, the guards had to watch this scene helplessly. They now regarded the crowd as a threat and Brunet rapidly lined men in front of the obelisk to stop the civilians and force them to separate at their level.  
Some of the guards had a hand close to their belts, ready to throw smoke grenades on Brunet's order.

The latter was seriously considering to order his men to shoot in the air in order to deter them. In a corner of his mind, he even thought about shooting on the crowd itself but this was only a solution he intended to consider as a last resort.

Behind the panicked and moving bodies, Cole saw a small figure standing in the shadow of the western arcade, hidden behind a column, far behind the crowd.

Squinting, he realized that it was a little girl. He also saw the harpactognathuses running on the rooftops and climbing on the nearby facades.

 _They're going to find her._

Without warning, he threw himself into the crowd and ran through it towards the avenue.

"Cole, come back! That's an order!"

But it was in vain that Brunet yelled, not only because the ambient cacophony muffled the sound of his loud voice but also because the crowd was so dense that they couldn't catch Cole anymore.  
He was alone now.

Cole managed to pass through the crowd and when he emerged, it was at the same spot where the formation had stood when the pachyrhinosaurs charged.  
The harpactognathuses which had harassed the back of the crowd were gone and the little girl hadn't moved from her column.

Cole rushed to her but he barely had crossed half the distance that a pack of harpactognathuses came out of the smoke-filled buildings.

Before they surrounded him, he grabbed his shotgun and shot down two of the pterosaurs until he ran out of ammo.

As he unsheathed his dagger, a _Harpactognathus_ swooped on his arm and bit.

While Cole was trying to get rid of it, the others threw themselves on him and the sight of the upper part of his body was concealed by the wings flapping around him.

X

After their comrades' retreat, Velasquez had held his position on the platform and Durant had left it.  
She was now a dozen of meters in front of the pachyrhinosaur, trying to channel the running crowd.

But it ignored her instructions and rapidly, ignored her as well, jostling her more and more until she was knocked over.

Durant immediately tried to get up but the arriving civilians did not see her and she was trampled.

The sight of her colleague disappearing under the human tide struck Velasquez with anguish.

"Tamara!" He screamed.

He then left his post, quickly went down the stairs, climbed the pachyrhinosaur' body before, once he was on its back, jumping forward and head to the spot where she had fallen.

X

Despite the amount of injuries that the pterosaurs inflicted him, Cole was fighting with all the strength he could muster and he had already delivered lethal blows to several of his opponents, forcing the others to let him go.

At one point, he blocked with one hand the jaw of the _Harpactognathus_ in front of him and squeezed the other around its neck before diving his head forward and bite the reptile's jugular in retaliation of a bite from the latter which had ripped off a piece of his left cheek.

The pack having lost too many of its members in the attack of the colossus, it gave up, leaving him alone in the middle of the street.

X

Pushing aside those in front of him, Velasquez covered the few meters separating him from Durant.

Once he was in sight of her body and saw her being trampled by the tourists, he became so angry that the next few moments happened like in a dream.

Losing momentarily control of himself, he acted more brutally, charging like a bull and grabbing those on his way by the shoulder to push them back violently.

When he came back to his senses, he was holding in his fist a shirt collar, the one of the surprised and frightened tourist in front of him.  
His other fist had stopped in extremis in the air, halfway from the man's nose.  
Before grabbing the latter, Velasquez had seen him walk on Durant's head. She was lying on her back just behind, inert.

Letting out a grunt, he released the tourist and crouched by Durant.

Her face was now purple, like if she had taken a severe beating, her breathing was wheezing and she had lost consciousness in the meantime.

"Help!" He cried in a voice full of despair.

Another guard arrived shortly after and came to help him take her away, with each passing one of her arms over their necks.

Maybe they aggravated her injuries by doing so but they had no other choice. They couldn't leave here there amidst all this chaos.

As they went back to the platform in front of the center's door, they saw the fleeing people climb en masse over the pachyrhinosaur and then climb the stairs half crawling before jostling each other at the threshold like a frightened herd entering into a canyon.  
The two guards decided to take the west ramp.

They went up, reached the inside of the Center but as they were about to enter in the rotunda, Velasquez and his colleague saw that J-SEC officers were trying to repel an harpactognathuses' incursion.

The rotunda being no longer safe, Velasquez's colleague looked towards a hallway on their left.

"This way!"

X

Cole headed to the child who, although she knew he was coming to save her, was a little frightened by his blood-drenched giant's look.  
From where he was, he saw that she was holding firmly in her arms a stuffed grey-brown _Giraffatitan_ , bellowing while standing on its hind legs.

Cole's wounds were hindering his movements and exhaustion was winning over his remaining strength little by little, decreasing his senses and sometimes making him half-stumble over the bodies on his path.  
Suddenly, the little girl opened her eyes wide out of terror and let out a scream.

Cole froze in his advance, while a strange sensation was engulfing his abdomen.  
He lowered his gaze and saw a large bloody white tip emerge from his belly: A quetzal had pierced him.

He grunted and stepped forward, feeling the beak leaving his back.

The pain made him stagger and he almost fell on his knees a few steps further.

He had a spear in sight but before he could grab and use it in a desperate attempt to defeat the _Quetzalcoatlus_ before succumbing first, the predator moved its head back and struck powerfully Cole's back, skewering him on its beak.

X

Brunet and Darbinian, who had watched the whole scene, saw Cole stand for a few seconds before falling on his knees, making his body slide along the pterosaur's long beak.

This loss was added to the guards' share of sorrow.  
So many had fallen during the battle and among the wounded, Brunet and Darbinian knew that some weren't going to survive the night.

Brunet looked behind him.  
Civilians continued to flow through the door, but there were still a sheer number on the platform, the stairs, the ramps and on the sidewalk behind them but people had stopped to came from the Avenue or the pond's sector. Another minute or two and they would all be inside.  
He didn't noticed it right away but Dearing and Grady had joined the crowd in the meantime.

Seeing them a few steps behind him, he couldn't help but to be surprised by the fact they were still alive as he had given up hope they would be.

The park director's gaze was suddenly drawn towards the Avenue.

As the buildings along the latter burned and the last screams coming from there faded, the girl that Cole wanted to save stepped on the ravaged and almost-deserted street, still holding her stuffed _Giraffatitan_ firmly against her chest.  
While the _Quetzalcoatlus_ which had killed Cole was busy feasting on his corpse, tearing off long shreds of flesh, she looked all around her, searching for an escape amidst the hell that surrounded her.

Grady, who was standing next to Dearing, heard her let out a barely audible cry when she saw a great shadow in the thick smoke behind the child.

As she looked to the plaza, the little girl saw a threatening shadow looming over her and turning, saw a tall sinister shape moving slowly towards her.

The huge head and the long neck of a _Quetzalcoatlus_ emerged from the smoke and the pterosaur's eyes met those of the girl, paralyzed by terror, not daring to move or scream, and like if she was under hypnosis, she let her stuffed _Giraffatitan_ fall on the ground.

The pterosaur walked further toward her, making the front part of its body move out of the smoke, placed its claws on the palm trunk between it and her, lowered its head a little and inclined the latter sideways as if to better observe its prey while the sounds it was making by rapidly knocking together its two mandibles echoed throughout the avenue.

Finally, as the smoke was pushed in their direction, engulfing them gradually, it took her in its beak while embers landed on the stuffed _Giraffatitan_ , setting it on fire.

Tears streamed down Dearing's horrified face and when the other _Quetzalcoatlus_ rushed to its congener and tried to take the girl's body from its beak, she looked away.

Grady then led her to the Center's door.  
They were now a little more than three hundred outside and the two had just to climb over the dead pachyrhinosaur, went up the stairs and walk the remaining few meters to the doorstep.

But as they began to lean on the herbivore's legs, a shadow flew over them while those in front of them moved back briskly, passing over the pachyrhinosaur's body, forcing Dearing and Grady to step back in order to avoid having someone jumping on them in their flight.

As they went backwards, towards the guards, they saw that a _Quetzalcoatlus_ was now standing at the top of the platform, blocking their retreat and towering over them. In its back, half a dozen of harpactognathuses galloped from the center's rotunda and stopped next to the larger predator.

People then attempted to run to the paths leading to the Zoo, the Tyrannosaur Kingdom and the western residential district in the greatest disorder, but other pterosaurs landed on their way.

"Stay together!" Brunet shouted to all at full lungs.

The civilians massed just in front of the pachyrhinosaur, behind the guards.  
The latter, only nine now, fired their last bullets and shot down some harpactognathuses but running out of ammunition, they grabbed spears or drawn their sabres before spreading around the civilians, ready to face the four Quetzalcoatlus, including the two of the Avenue, and the two dozen of harpactognathuses that surrounded them.

Long seconds elapsed during which the pterosaurs came closer to the group and scanned it with attention, looking for flaws in the defence organized by the guards.

Some harpactognathuses suddenly rushed forward, galloping a few meters before leaping in the air right towards the humans but the guards responded in time and the black-faced pterosaurs hit hard the shields raised across their trajectory before being pushed back.

The guards firmly holding their positions in order to avoid the risk of creating a breach in their defence, didn't moved forward to kill the harpactognathuses and those hissed at them before joining their original positions.

There was a similar assault on the right flank and it was thwarted in the same manner but as soon they were pushed back, the harpactognathuses charged again, all along the line of defence this time. Taking advantage of the fact that the guards were busy with them, the quetzalcoatluses all advanced at the same time, including the one at the top of the platform, and struck their beaks amidst the crowd, repeatedly, making many victims.

Some of the Hell Storks even took their victims out of the melee and the harpactognathus that had stayed out of the latter started to harass them for a piece of their pittance, leaping in the air to bite an arm or a leg sticking out of their giant distant cousins' beaks. The quetzalcoatluses did not care at all and secured their preys by swallowing them in one go thanks to their long and extensible neck.  
Said harpactognathuses resigned and joined the others in the attack of the group.

In the middle of the fray, Corporal Chapuy suddenly had the idea that allowed to repel this assault.  
He knew that pterosaurs hated loud sounds, and he was in possession of a horn.  
He waited for a brief moment of respite to grab the instrument and blew it.

A single blast, short but powerful, echoed against the walls of the Discovery Center and all the pterosaurs, surprised, moved back instinctively, letting the guards reorganize themselves.  
But the respite was short because as soon as the echoes of the horn' blow were lost in the distance, the flying reptiles got a grip on themselves and all together, they launched a new assault.

An attempt was made to keep the quetzalcoatluses at bay with spears, but while one was held back, the others had free rein, and the simultaneous assault of all the pterosaurs greatly tested the guards' resistance.

Seeing this, the crowd panicked even more and many were those who started to climb over the pachyrhinosaur in order to reach the interior of the center despite the presence of a quetzalcoatlus perched on the body, thinking that the latter was too busy with the guard that was facing it with his spear.

While some even passed under its wings, it lost interest in the guard and pecked here and there near its feet, finally catching one of the fleeing civilians by the abdomen before throwing his disembowelled body in the direction of the guard.

Excited by the screams behind it, the Hell Stork turned to chase them, moving out of the top of the ceratopsian's corpse.

Losing ground, the mass of humans was forced to move back up to the pachyrhinosaur and the latter gradually disappeared as the crowd climbed over it.

While harpactognathuses were diving on the visitors, even making those standing on the pachyrhinosaur fall, Brunet and Darbinian were separated from the rest of the group.  
Between them and it, three of the spotted pterosaurs had turned towards them, ready to leap, and on the other side, a _Quetzalcoatlus_ was advancing.

The two guards, standing back to back, closed their grip on the handle of their sabres, exchanged a brief look before turning towards their foes.

Not taking her eyes off the harpactognathuses trio, Darbinian also drew with her free hand the long curved knife sheathed in her back.  
Having used it earlier, it was still stained with blood. She showed it to the pterosaurs and grinned, daring them to come closer.

While he was thinking about how to defeat the _Quetzalcoatlus_ in front of him, Brunet saw a black-clad figure emerge from the smoke in the avenue.

Others saw it too and they quickly noticed that it wasn't a grey guard, which raised questions, and as he was running towards them, the individual drew, to the surprise of many, a sword from his back and rushed to the _Quetzalcoatlus_ that was about to attack Brunet and Darbinian.

As the animal was about to strike Brunet with its beak, the black-clad individual cut off one of its legs with his sword.

Surprised, the pterosaur started to move away, dragging itself on the slabs, and wanted to fly away but the mysterious soldier jumped on its back, pinning it against the ground.

The flying reptile turned its head in order to peck at its attacker but before it could fight back, the soldier struck two powerful sword blows on its neck, beheading it.

As the body of the _Quetzalcoatlus_ collapsed under him, the soldier appeared clearly in the eyes of the group and the other pterosaurs, alerted by the _Quetzalcoatlus_ ' cries of pain and looking at him with surprise.

At first glance, one might have thought that he was a member of some special force because of the Kevlar protective gear he was wearing and in a way, the man was, but just like in the case of the grey guards, some elements of his equipment evoked the Middle Ages or a fantasy version of it rather than the beginning of the twenty-first century.  
As they had seen, his main weapon was a long one-handed sword, with a handle long enough for the weapon to be held firmly in both hands if needed, a cruciform guard with sharp ends, and a straight blade, whose one of the edges was crenelated.  
He also wore not gloves but gauntlets, whose fingers had scale-like structures on their surface, giving the hands a talons-like appearance.  
But the most noticeable feature of his gear was his helmet's movable mask-like visor. Of a metallic and sinister aspect, it had only two holes for the eyes as well as a series of slits at mouth level, designed in such way to look like a row of sharp teeth, dehumanizing its bearer and giving him or her a disturbing and threatening aura that inspired dread in the hearts of men and beasts alike. It was like if it had been designed to make the soldier look like a predator.

The masked soldier's piercing blue eyes scanned the group, looking at their half-relieved, half-intimidated expressions while the pterosaurs were putting a grip on themselves after the arrival of this unexpected saviour.

But before they pounced on him, a few soldiers equipped like him emerged in their turn from the smoke, all around the plaza, running to their companion's help. The latter, still holding his sword in hand, unsheathed a pistol with the other and shot the nearest _Harpactognathus_ , raising yelps from its congeners which then moved away from the group.

In the midst of the chaos that ensued on the plaza, one could saw that a significant portion of the soldiers had each a unique main weapon, and so a unique way to deal with the pterosaurs.

From the path that led to the pond, came a tall and slender individual who charged the harpactognathuses from behind, and like her companion, she carried a weapon of medieval inspiration, some kind of double-bladed glaive she used to cut off heads and slash the bodies and wings within her range while being constantly moving and dodging the attacks with agility in some sort of deadly dance.

The use of bladed weapons in fights against prehistoric animals was indeed surprising for some but both the grey guards and the masked soldiers had realized that they were more feared by animals than firearms, probably because the first had to evoke them the horns, spikes or even certain types of teeth frequently seen within the Animal Kingdom, thus inspiring them a natural fear while firearms looked like nothing known to them and individuals had to be confronted to them at least once to learn to fear them too.  
As a mercenary hired by InGen had stated during the Saurian Wars: " _Sometimes I wonder if fighting them with spears and swords wouldn't be better? I mean, it's true. Those bastards are on you before you can scream Chimichangas and as a result, they're shredding your face or ripping through your intestines while you desperately try to reach your gun's trigger. On the other hand, a sword thrust into its belly and that's it! Your saurian have been take care of_."

Thus, to face a primitive opponent devoid of technological means but nevertheless formidable since Nature had gifted them with natural weapons and always fighting in close combat, the grey guards and a fraction of InGen Security's forces had adapted and been inspired by combat tactics and technologies from before the mass use of firearms, explaining the strange mix between the technological modernity of the 21st century on one side and, on the other, something reminiscent of Antiquity and Middle Ages' soldiers and warriors, a mix that was based on the combination of the different eras' best.

A good part of the masked soldiers was equipped with quite contemporary weapons such as pistols or light machine guns although again, few were armed in a similar manner.

Near the obelisk, a man even burned the harpactognathuses in front of him with a flamethrower, leaving only their charred corpses in his wake.

As Brunet and some other guards were preparing to, after a moment of hesitation, go help the soldiers drive the pterosaurs out, one of the latter shouted at them with a voice distorted by his mask-like visor:

"Cover your ears!"

One of his companions pushed a button on the box that was hanging at his belt and a high-pitched and piercing sound, increasingly louder and louder, similar to a cry from beyond the grave, filled the air.

It was so scary and disagreeable that all around, both animals and humans were greatly bothered. The pterosaurs shook their heads and started to scream in pain as they moved back.

Even with their ears covered, the civilians and grey guards still heard the sound and for a visitor that didn't covered his ears in time, its listening was so painful that he fell on his knees and screamed.

Immobilised, the guards were no longer able to help the masked soldiers who, on the contrary, weren't bothered at all by the sound since their ears were protected and before the eyes of the group still massed in front of the pachyrhinosaur, they slaughtered the pterosaurs that hadn't yet flee, spilling their blood on the victims' bodies. The civilians saw that the look the guards gave to their saviours was full of everything but benevolence.

Defeated, the last pterosaurs rushed to take off but hardly had they left the soldiers' range that a black helicopter appeared.

A machine gun fired and in their flight, a non-negligible part of the fleeing animals were shot down and the few that managed to escape the city flew to the Misty Mounts or the Western Cordillera.

When the helicopter returned a few moments later to fly over the streets, the group saw that it sported not only InGen's logo but also an emblem, representing Saint George of Lydda slaying the Dragon.

* * *

 **A/N:**

 _Hypothetical Casting:_

 _ **Alban Lenoir** as Vincent Chapuy_


	75. The Slayers

_Last chapters were hectic with this battle in Burroughs._ _  
Please, I would really like to know yours thoughts about it or any other part of the story so far, whether they are positive or not.  
Thank you again for reading._

* * *

"I thought that the I. rex had guzzled you," Brunet said to Dearing and Grady. "You are lucky to be alive."

"It was close," Grady replied.

They were standing on the platform up the stairs, ready to enter in the Discovery Center, but before Dearing and Grady could cross the threshold, Brunet came to stand in front of them and he severely looked at them in the eyes, intimidating the two just with his gaze.

"When we went to the Center, we found Hamada, dead, stabbed in the heart. Who did that?" He asked inquisitively.

They swallowed and as Dearing's chest tightened, Grady began to mumble an explanation.

"Listen Gilbert, what happened…"

"It was me," Dearing said weakly.

"Claire ..." Grady hissed, inviting her to keep quiet.

"Let her talk Owen!" Brunet told him.

Dearing took a step towards the Frenchman, holding in her right hand Hamada's dagger.

"It was an accident. I wanted to put the dagger aside but Katashi begged me to kill him. I couldn't so he grabbed my hand and forced me to stab him. As I realized it, the blade was already in his heart," she told while Brunet was looking at her coldly. "I am truly sorry, if there is anything I can do to repent for this act…"

With the palm open, she handed him the dagger.  
She was so ashamed that she didn't dared to look at Brunet in the eyes

He approached slowly and gently took the dagger by the handle.  
He stared for a moment at the dried blood on the blade and slowly passed his fingers along the edge of the blade.

"Claire. As you must know, I don't have a high opinion of you," he reminded her. "What happened wasn't an accident but it wasn't a murder either."

Dearing looked up at Brunet.

"You're not a murderer. What you did, even if it was against your will, was ending the suffering of a dying man," he explained before hanging the dagger to his belt.

Then, in a bitter voice, he added:

"Katashi would have surely wished that one of ours allows him to join the afterlife instead of you but it is how it is. Excuse me, I must go take care of my men."

Brunet took leave of them and entered the Center after the other guards. Dearing and Grady crossed the threshold in their turn soon after and headed to the lower levels, in search of Zach and Gray.

While he was checking the condition of each of his men, then scattered in the rotunda and the galleries and halls nearby, Brunet found Velasquez in the toilets.

He was kneeled on the floor and crying loudly, holding Durant's body in his arms. She had succumbed to multiple internal haemorrhages just a few seconds before.  
Darbinian was also in the room. She put a hand on Velasquez's shoulder and knelt down to offer him some comforting words.

Two guards came with a stretcher and a body bag.

Velasquez watched them put Durant's body in the bag, then put the latter on the stretcher and leave.

He stood there for a moment, staring sadly at the ground, then he started to wander in the building but as he stepped in the rotunda, he recognized among the crowd there those who had trampled Durant.  
The sorrow that had struck him have way to a great rage.

He quickened his pace and rapidly covered two-thirds of the distance that separated him from those responsible of his friend and comrade's death.

"Velasquez!" Brunet shouted in his back.

Seeing that he was still walking in the same direction, Brunet forcefully grabbed his arm, stopping him on the spot and forced him to look at him straight in the eyes.

"I know way too well the hatred that dwell in your heart right now. The people who trampled her are assholes but they are still defenceless civilians! Attack them and believe me, you will step on a path from which one hardly return." He warned. "She wouldn't want that to happen to you…"

Velasquez understood in Brunet's intonation that he had experienced a similar situation in the past.  
His eyes stopped on the right shoulder of his superior where, unlike in his own case or that of most guards, there were only the five stars of the Guard and not also the French flag like one would have expected.  
Brunet was one of the bannerless, a term that referred to guards that didn't bore the flag of their country of origin, either because they didn't want to for certain reasons such as a lack of attachment for their homeland or a long mercenary career during which they served other entities than the latter, either because they weren't or didn't feel worthy of bearing it.  
As Niall Forrester had explained to him the night before, the Guard also welcomed exiles, voluntary as well as involuntary, and individuals looking for redemption. However, being a bannerless wasn't seen as shameful in the Guard and it was very disrespectful to show disdain for them. They were equal to their comrades in every way and could be eligible for the position of marshal.

Velasquez knew that Brunet was a mercenary before he joined the Guard, which perhaps explained his status, and that he had experienced violent conflicts such as the Rwandan Civil War, the First Congo War and the Kosovo War, but did not know in what kind of operations he had been involved and for whom he had worked.  
He had just heard from one of the officers that Marshal Störmer didn't trust Brunet and that without Hamada speaking up for him to Lord Pennant many years before, he would be rotting in prison.  
Who was Gilbert Brunet the mercenary?

"Lieutenant Brunet!" Hailed a husky voice behind them.

They turned to the vestibule and saw the swordsman who had beheaded one of the _Quetzalcoatlus_ in front of the group trapped outside. He was moving in their direction, followed by some of his companions.

They had all removed their helmets, holding them under their arms, and some of their protective gear, leaving their arms bare.

The swordsman was their leader. He was a man of great stature, barely forty years old, with an athletic body, a close-shaven chiselled face and long brown hairs that fell down to his shoulders.

His right-hand person was a slender woman slightly older than him and whose red hairs were cut short.  
She had the peculiarity of having tattooed arms and her main weapon, the double-bladed glaive they had seen earlier, was strapped to her back.

Brunet made some steps towards the arrivals, stopped and greeted the swordsman coldly:

"Sherman."

"My men have cleaned the city from all rampaging creatures," the latter said. "I…"

"Yeah, well you took your time!" One of the guards launched in a reproachful tone.

"A thank you would be appreciated, right?" Snapped one of Sherman's companions, a man of Asian descent with a shaven head. "It's not like we just saved your asses!"

The guard grunted, and like most of his comrades gathered there, he had a hand kept near the handle of his sabre, then sheathed in its scabbard, and was giving a black look at the arriving soldiers.

The visitors and employees in the rotunda had become silent when they heard the altercation and the tension between the two armed groups made them feel uncomfortable.

Sherman glanced at the guards and spoke to them:

"I am aware that you are still angry at us since that incident in Caer Draig years ago. But right now, around twenty thousand people are counting on us to act against the threats of this godforsaken island."

He approached Brunet and said to him:

"Hoskins is currently talking with Marshal Störmer in order to define a common strategy on which we must agree. It is in the interest of all that we must collaborate," he added, glancing at the visitors.

As Brunet and Sherman discussed, Drekanson moved closer to Velasquez, who was standing away, and he revealed to him the soldiers' nature:

"The Slayers. The very elite of InGen's troops. Seasoned dinosaurs' hunters and enforcers."

Lambert Ross, who had up to then been sitting against a wall nearby, joined them and added:

"To fight monsters, Hoskins created monsters. These guys are for the most part veterans of the Saurian Wars. Most of them were good people whom I once called friends but the primitive war that we lived didn't leave them all unscathed and at the end of the latter, the boundary that separated them from the wild beasts they had fought had become thin for some."

Looking at Sherman, his right-hand woman and the other Slayers, he noticed that they all bore the same tattoo on the right forearm, the one of Saint George on his steed thrusting his spear into the Dragon

"You weren't some mere InGen soldier, you were one of them," Velasquez realized, making the connection between Ross' tattoo and the one of the other Slayers. "That's why Bellamy didn't looked happy last night when I mentioned that my cousin also had the tattoo of Saint George and the Dragon. He is also one of them…."

"I trained most of those who stand there. I was their leader for a time," the innkeeper stated. "To say that Sherman was even younger than you when Hoskins brought him from Afghanistan. If the frightened young military chaplain I took under my wing was looking at today's swordsman, he wouldn't recognize himself."

One of the Slayers, a fortyish Costa Rican Amerindian with long and straight black hairs, had glimpsed Velasquez out of the corner of his eye.

He stepped aside from the group formed by his companions to better stare at Velasquez, like if he was familiar.

"Julio?" He asked.

Velasquez wondered how the soldier knew his name and then, by staring back at him, he recognized the man he hadn't seen in years.

"Paco?"

The two men separated from their respective groups and came to hug each other in the middle of the rotunda.

"I would have liked to see you again in other circumstances, cousin," Velasquez declared to his cousin in the language of the Tun-Si.

"Likewise. You have all my condolences for your fallen brothers and sisters in arms," Paco Cortès told him in the same language.

Guards and Slayers alike looked at them with surprise.

Sherman was a bit amused by the scene:

"I didn't knew that Paco had a cousin among your ranks," he admitted to Brunet. "Perhaps their relationship is a first step towards the return of an understanding between us."

"There are wounds that require more than just hugs to heal, Gregor."

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _Hypothetical Casting:_

 _ **Zach McGowan** as Gregor Sherman_  
 _ **Terry Chen** as Kevin, one of the Slayers._  
 _ **Gerardo Taracena** as Paco Cortès_


	76. Reunited

Before they went to the lower levels, Dearing borrowed a radio from a J-SEC officer and she immediately contacted the control room to inform them that she and Grady were alive, a news that the technicians received with relief, and to ask them Young's and the boys' locations.

" _Zara is not at the Administration anyway_ ," Krill replied. " _She was spotted taking the elevator down to the monorail station. She had to be in or around the Center during the attack_."

Dearing heard Krill swallow.  
The technician was nervous and considering what just happened, she would have been surprised that she was not.

" _Claire, may I ask you a favor?_ " Krill asked.

"Sure."

" _Find her please. Lowery and I are so worried about her…_ "

"As long as I am here I will look for her, I promise."

About a minute and a half later, as they went down a wide staircase, Cruthers recontacted them:

" _We got them! They are in the holograms' hall, near the big alcove_."

"Thanks, Lowery."

They reached the Center's basement and headed to the holograms' hall, passing among the hundreds of people who had sought refuge there. They previously had huddled together while waiting for the end of the attack but they were still massed against the false rock of the tortuous corridors' walls.

The hologram's hall was an area with several alcoves of different sizes and each with a stage.  
In front of the alcoves, there was a console on which the user could choose the species of which he wanted to see a holographic representation, actually based on the Pepper's ghost technique. A hidden projector projected the image of the animal on a mirror horizontal to the ground and then on a tilted tulle canvas, so thin that it was invisible to the public's eyes but dense enough to capture the projected light while the heart of the illusion rested on the depth that existed between the back of the stage and the hologram. Concealed speakers played each species' specific sounds.  
The hall was usually completely darkened but emergency lights had been turned on for safety reasons.

Like Cruthers had told them, they found Zach and Gray near the console of the central alcove, where the holograms of the largest creatures could be projected.

"It's them!" Dearing exclaimed. "Zach! Gray!"

Hearing their aunt's familiar voice hailing them, the boys looked up and scanned the crowd between them. They finally saw Dearing's dishevelled red hairs moving in their direction.

"Claire!" They shouted.

They weaved in and out between the other survivors and when they met her, she took them in her arms.

Zach was somewhat surprised to see Owen Grady accompany his aunt.

"Where have you been?" Gray asked.

"Searching you. I even tracked you on foot through the Reserve…"

She suddenly noticed that Zach had a long cut that barred his left cheek.

"Zach, what happened to you?" Dearing worried, looking at him with wide eyes and inspecting the wound.

Zach saw that the lower part of her pant's right leg was bloodstained.  
He considered this to be more serious than his own wound.

"Gray saved me from some friendly fire," he told her. "You weren't spared either it seems… We're alive, that's what matters. Where is Zara? We didn't see her."

"I was going to ask you the same question," their aunt said. "Let's try to find her."

"Mrs Dearing!" Someone hailed.

She turned to the voice and realized that it was a J-SEC officer.

The latter seemed to be out of breath, he had to run to fetch her.

"You must go to the meeting room as soon as you can," he said. "The board as summoned you."

Dearing froze on the spot and paled. For her, those words sounded like a death sentence.

X

As they parked in the Administration's car park, some ashes started to fall on Burroughs.

Even from the city, the Sibo's rumblings were audible and the volcanic plume then reached a height of fifteen kilometres.  
From the roof of the Administration, one could even see lava rivers flow down the slopes and the distant reddish glow coming from the volcano's surroundings, those of fires ravaging the jungle of Sector Seven and threatening to spread towards the South.

Waiting near the entrance of the bridge leading to the Administration's entrance, Sembène had waited for the arrival of Grady, worried about the state of his friend.

"Owen!"

"Barry! Are the girls safe?"

"Still frightened by the eruption but they are safe and sound. We locked them in the holding building. Luckily, it resisted to the earthquake."

"And you, you're alright?"

"I'm one of the few to which nothing happened today."

Like Grady, Sembène was supposed to be on a day-off, but as soon as the news of the metriacanthosaurs' attack had reached him, he had rushed to the keepers' office to know more about it and get ready if the keepers' help was called upon. He had learned that Grady had left his bungalow to help Dearing in search of her nephews but when Mount Sibo began to show signs of an imminent awakening, Sembène had driven to the achillobator's paddock and told his co-workers to join him there so they could put the raptors to safety.  
They narrowly had succeeded since the achillobators refused to obey, it was only when the quetzalcoatluses flew over the paddock that the four predators had rushed inside the holding building and stayed agglutinated for minutes in the back of their cage, trembling at each of the Sibo's manifestations and looking intermittently at the ceiling above them.

Sembène noticed that Grady's T-Shirt had a tear on its right side and that there was blood stains around it.

"You're wounded!"

"It's nothing. I will treat it as soon as I will have some free time."

"If you say so."

"After the meeting, I will have to go back to the paddock."

Sembène shook his head.

"Owen, you need some rest! Have some and treat your wound please because I don't know what will happen in the upcoming days but we will need you in full possession of your faculties," he begged him. "The guys and I will take the first watches."

"Ok mother hen. Thanks. At the slightest problem, call me anyway, please."

As Sembène returned to his vehicle, they crossed the bridge and began to climb the steps leading to the door, but during the climb, Dearing moaned in pain because of her calf.

"This calf needs to be treated and dressed," Grady said. "Let's go to the infirmary first, the board can wait."

Once inside the building, they headed straight for the infirmary.

There were already wounded on the few beds that were there and treatments were then provided by the replacement nurse, the chief nurse being busy elsewhere.

Grady then invited Dearing to sit on one of the chairs in the waiting room and pulled up her pants' leg, revealing the wound.  
Some of the Indominus' lingual papillae had thrusted themselves several centimetres in the flesh and half of one was even still in it. Blood was no longer flowing but had coagulated, leaving trails all around the calf.

From his backpack, Grady took out a first aid kit which he opened on the floor. He grabbed a splinter forceps and delicately, he extracted the lingual papillae's half.  
Before he put it down, he looked at it:

"If it had been whole, you could have used it as a hairpin. A little keepsake…," he joked in a low voice.

Despite the extraction's pain, Dearing gave him a faint smile.

He then went to a nearby sink to moisten a piece of tissue and while he was doing that, the nurse came to treat Zach's cheek.

Grady returned and washed the wound to remove impurities, dirt and dried blood, then he dried it before using an antiseptic and wrapped a bandage around it.

"Thank you," Dearing said, warmly taking his hand.

"Let's hope that there will be no complications…"

"Do you want me to have a look on yours…?"

"It can wait. We have to go to the meeting room."

"Put her there!" They heard the chief nurse say.

The latter, a tall, slender and moustached young Costa Rican man, entered backwards in the room, guiding two J-SEC officers that were carrying a stretcher on which laid the lifeless body of a raven-haired woman.

When they passed in front of them, Dearing gasped as she recognized the body: It was Young's.  
Tears began to flow from her eyes.

"What happened?" She asked them, noting that there were no injuries other than some claw marks on her face.

"She was found down the stairs that lead to the monorail station. She must have been climbing them up when she encountered one of the harpactognathuses that had entered in the building. We think that it made her lost her balance and that the fall broke her neck," the chief nurse told them. "My condolences."

The officers went to the only free bed and laid Young's body on it.

Dearing knelt down at the foot of the bed and began to mourn the death of her assistant.  
Grady and Zach, also saddened, consoled her.

One of the officers approached Dearing. He was holding a small object in the palm of his hand.

"She had this in her hand when we found her," he said.

He handed her a black flash drive hanging on a silver chain.  
Dearing had already seen said flash drive before as Young frequently used it at work and outside.

She took the flash drive and the two officers along with the chief nurse left, leaving them with the late assistant but a few seconds later, one of the control room's technician, Daniel Connors, a well-dressed and groomed man in his early thirties, came to fetch Dearing:

"Claire, the board…"

"I know! Leave me in peace five minutes for fuck's sake!" She yelled at him.

"They said at once," Connors insisted. "And it was two minutes ago. I offer you my condolences for Miss Young, what happened is tragic, but with all due respect ma'am, I advise you to go to the meeting room immediately."

Despite the situation, he had the nerve to behave like a cock of the walk and his mere presence enraged Dearing. Reluctantly, she left the infirmary, followed by her nephews and Grady.

"Personally, I wouldn't give much for your post…" she heard him whisper, thinking she was far enough.

Dearing turned briskly, gave him a death stare and said:

"Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up…"

Connors fell silent and while watching her head to the meeting room, he readjusted his tie and swallowed.

* * *

 _See you next week for the next chapters.  
Once again, don't hesitate to leave a comment or fav the story if you haven't yet.  
Have a nice week._


	77. The Board

Along the hallway that led to the meeting room, located just a few meters from the control room, many employees of the Administration had gathered while awaiting Dearing's arrival.

When she appeared at the end of the hallway followed by Grady and her nephews, some had great difficulty in recognizing her with the shaggy hairs that were half-covering her haggard face, her dirty clothes and the hiking shoes she wore, almost too big for her feet and muddy, leaving visible shoe prints on her way.  
The scent of her vanilla scent was now blended with the smells of the jungle's moisture and the tyrannnosaur's droppings, and it reached the nostrils of those she passed by.  
Her gait was also punctuated by her right leg's limping and when they noticed that one of her jodhpurs' leg was torn and bloodstained, the employees wondered through which ordeals she had gone through.

Walking behind at her left, Zach saw Krill at the end of the hallway, crying in Cruthers' arms, who was himself deeply saddened. The two technicians just had learned about Young's death.

When they reached the door, the J-SEC officer guarding it stopped Grady and the boys.

"Only Claire can enter," he said. "Stay outside please."

Dearing turned and saw that Grady and Zach were giving her the same look, encouraging her to have courage.

She faced the door, took a deep breath, grabbed the handle, and entered.

Dearing scanned the room.  
All the park executives, as well as Wu and Hoskins, were there, standing behind a large oval table. They had turned their gaze to her.

She noticed that Masrani was missing however, as she had expected his presence.

"Where is Mr. Masrani?" She asked.

"He had been escorted to the presidential suite of the Palace," Hoskins replied. "He is still in shock."

On the back wall, a large screen had been turned on.  
It allowed to have videoconferences with InGen's higher-ups in Palo Alto, California. The screen showed a room whose walls were covered with a dark brown wood planks. It was dimly lit except at its heart, where ceiling lights illuminated a large oval wooden table and the chairs arranged around it, and at the level of one of the wall's centre where an _InGen corporation_ sign diffused its own light.  
In front of it and facing the camera, three individuals, key members of the board of directors, were seated. Each had a touch pad placed in front of them on the table.  
On the right was Alistair Iger, the public relations director and spokesman for the corporation, a tall thin black man about fifty years old; On the left was seated a quite small spectacled septuagenarian with a bald forehead and whose red tie suit betrayed his stoutness: Dominick Silverman, chief financial officer; And finally, in the centre, was Susan Lynton, vice-president, who although she was a few years older than Silverman, looked younger because of her elegance and many even said that she still looked good for her age. She wore a flawless beige suit and had a squared haircut of blonde hairs.  
She spoke first:

"Greetings, Mrs. Dearing. Since you have finally arrived, we can start the meeting despite Mr. Lockwood's absence."

Benjamin Lockwood, philanthropist, former friend of John Hammond, and notable sponsor of biology researches that aimed to improve the human being, was InGen's chief executive officer.  
Having succeeded Peter Ludlow after his death during the infamous San Diego incident, it was he who reopened negotiations with Masrani for InGen's buyout.  
In recent years, he had become notable for his absences, justified by health issues, and he supervised InGen as much as he could from his mansion in northern California, sometimes sending his aide to Palo Alto to convey his instructions and ensure their application. But actually, it was Lynton, more accessible to investors and present in the media, who ran the company.

The park executives sat around the table, except for Dearing, who was asked to stand between the table and the screen.

The board started by making a provisional assessment of the disaster:

"As you know, state of emergency has been declared for Isla Nublar," Iger said. "The figures we received a few minutes ago show a provisional estimate of one hundred and sixteen dead and four hundred and sixty-eight confirmed wounded, the kind of figures worthy of a large-scale terrorist attack and judging by the footage that we are getting, those numbers are likely to be revised upwards in the coming hours," he stated while looking at his tablet. "It's only a matter of minutes before the president himself call us and ask how the fuck it could have happened!"

"The operation _Fallen Kingdom_ has been launched," Lynton continued. "Instructions have already been sent to the park's staff. As originally planned, the _Anne B_ will dock at the east docks this evening and a first part of ours assets, including some animals of the zoo, will be loaded. The Arcadia is being equipped at Puntarenas as we speak and it will arrive in Nublar tomorrow at the end of the afternoon. The animals retrieved during the operation will be brought back to the mainland where they will be quarantined in our facilities in the Ismaloya Mountains while waiting to be transferred to the United States."

"An auction will be organized soon," Silverman announced. "The money we will gain through the sale of the retrieved biological and technological assets should allow us to partially offset the financial losses due to the current disaster. But if we want the company to avoid bankruptcy, budgetary restrictions and staff layoffs will be necessary. It starts now with yours."

Dearing froze on the spot. She expected it but it felt like she was dying.

"Of course," the chief financial officer said, "it hasn't been voted on yet, but following a discussion among the board's members, we can announce that you can already begin to clean your desk."

"And what opinion has Mr. Masrani on the matter you would ask us? You already know it thanks to the three breaches that you had with him today," InGen's spokesman added.

"If there was only that… You are also partly responsible for the current crisis," Silverman stated. "Let us expose the facts: Among other things, you refused Captain Hamada's proposal to build high-capacity bunkers…"

"I was forced to refuse because you were opposed to this proposal, Mr. Silverman," Dearing retorted.

Silverman pretended to be surprised.

"Really? I don't remember having any exchange with you about these bunkers."

 _You damn lying yid!_ Dearing cried silently.

Silverman didn't looked like it at first sight, but Dearing had been quick to realize that he was a sly bastard, openly lying in front of everyone. But it was his word against hers…

"You also built the quetzalcoatluses' aviary near Mount Sibo," the vice president added. "Although the decision was approved by the board, remains the fact that the damages due to the eruption allowed the pterosaurs to leave it."

Dearing was still unaware of how the pterosaurs had escaped and she would have accepted to be blamed if the park's chief steward, Ramon Figueres, hadn't intervene to reveal the circumstances.

"Nonsenses!" Exclaimed the latter, a well-padded fortyish years old man with a moustache. "It's the Indominus that allowed them to escape, I saw the footage! The aviary resisted to the earthquake and the eruption!"

"Is it true, Mr. Figueres?" Lynton asked. "Let's have a look on this footage taken by a drone…"

The screen displayed the footage, which shown the aviary and its cirque in the darkness.  
In the background, lava flowed along the slopes of the Sibo and volcanic bombs were falling from the skies, exploding on the ground when they landed.

The drone's camera zoomed to show a large gaping breach in the middle of the aviary's mesh. Below the vegetation was in flames.  
If one only considered this footage, he or she could have easily be led to believe that a volcanic bomb had made this breach.

"The news of the Indominus' escape has not yet reached the media's ears and we don't want that to happen," Iger exposed. "Imagine for a second the panic that would strike the remaining visitors on Isla Nublar if they learned that such a monster freely roams the island. The building in which you are would be immediately stormed."

"Being bound to the company by a non-disclosure agreement, any employee or former employee that will tell the press about what really happened will be sued," Lynton warned. "On their side, the grey guards are also bound by secrecy regarding their missions safe for a permission or a counter-order of their command. But Victor spoke with Marshal Störmer and the latter understands our position so there should be no risk on that side."

"Coming back to you, Ms. Dearing," Silverman said. "Your main fault today is your abandonment of the crisis' supervision to roam the woods with Mr. Grady, your _virile wapiti_."

The mention of this nickname made him chuckle and he addressed to Dearing a mocking smile of yellowish teeth.

Dearing blushed out of shame.  
 _How did he knew?_

"Yes, we know about your hanky-panky and we have audiotapes to prove it. If it was just up to me, I would be broadcasting them right now."

She remembered an email where Hoskins had announced that he would implement counterintelligence measures within all key InGen facilities.

She had not imagine that he was going to riddle with micros places that one didn't expected to be.

"Per se, we don't care about to whom you open the thighs but what bother us is that it happened several times in workplaces, an act that the code of conduct you both signed reprove," Silverman continued. "Disciplinary sanctions will also apply to Mr. Grady."

"Let's refocus on the subject," Lynton suggested, thinking that Silverman was lingering too much on Dearing and Grady's affair while there was more urgent matter to discuss. "We know that you went into the jungle for reasons other than those mentioned by Dominick. Victor told us that your nephews had been attacked and got lost in the Reserve. I understand your desire of saving relatives but it was the job of the guards and the J-SEC, not yours. It wasn't up to Vic to replace you at last minute! Unless the situation forced you to do otherwise, your duty was to stay in the control room."

And the board continued to incriminate Dearing for a whole quarter of an hour during which Iger even declared "Do not count on us to pay you a lawyer, we're not called Biosyn!".  
Few tried to defend her, arguing that she couldn't have foreseen the way the situation would escalate and that many times, everyone was caught off-guard by the turn of events. But they rejected or ignored their arguments.

At the end of what was the equivalent of a trial or a pure and simple execution from Dearing's perspective, they finally concluded and dismissed Dearing with a cold but scathing "Goodbye.".

The screen was turned off and the meeting's attendance remained silent for a moment while looking at Dearing.

Not giving back anyone a single glance, she headed for the door.

"Farewell." She said over her shoulder to her now-ex colleagues, in a barely audible way.

Then, stooped and keeping her gaze low, exhausted physically and emotionally, she left the meeting room.

When she joined Grady and Gray, she said:

"All I want now is a good meal, a shower and a bed."

Soon after, she added:

"What a day! What a shitty day!"

They understood that she was going to be fired but as they were about to leave, Cruthers pointed Hoskins to Zach as he left the room in his turn:

"It's him. Go. He must know."

Zach had indeed revealed to Cruthers and Krill the fact that with Gray, they had witnessed the killings of three grey guards by a band of mysterious mercenaries.  
Once he had told them everything, the technician had suggested that he inform Hoskins.

The young man then walked towards the director of the security division and hailed him:

"Uh excuse me, Mr. Hoskins?"

Hoskins turned around, surprised by the fact that a teenager had hailed him in the park's administration just after an important meeting.

"Yes, young man? What are you doing here?"

"Claire is my aunt. As you might know, she searched us after the attack of our truck. As my brother and I were crossing the jungle, we witnessed the murder of three grey guards."

At the announcement of this news, all who heard Zach turned to him and repeated with a stunned look the word murder.

Shocked looks were exchanged, and Hoskins looked Zach with a serious face.

"A murder? Tell me exactly what happened, please," he asked, taking him aside.

While Zach told him this part of their journey, Harriman joined his fellow technicians:

"Guys? I had the coast guards on the phone… What's all this racket?" He wondered, noting the agitation created by the news.

Cruthers then told him what Zach had said to him and as soon as he had the opportunity, Harriman passed the information to Brunet.

"Good Lord… The last thing we needed is that someone use the current chaos at his own advantage in order to accomplish his misdeeds," Hoskins said, troubled. "Thank you for informing me. Good luck! This island will soon be nothing but a bad memory."

Zach turned around and walked away to join his aunt.

When they disappeared at the corner of the hallway, the employees scattered to return to their posts.

Hoskins pulled out his phone and dialled Lynton's number:

"Susan? We need to talk. In private."

He returned to the deserted meeting room and locked the door behind him.

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _Hypothetical Casting:_

 _ **Jessica Walter** as Susan Lynton_  
 _ **Orlando Jones** as Alistair Iger_  
 _ **Tom McBeath** as Dominick Silverman_


	78. Arroz Navideño

When Grady, Dearing and her nephews left the administration, headwinds had pushed the Sibo's plume further east and thus, the last rays of the setting sun illuminated the steaming ruins of the Promenade's and Richard Owen Avenue's buildings.

In the alleys and streets, wounded were still searched among the bodies while the dead were picked up and loaded in trucks and pickups. The corpses of the killed animals were gathered to be heaped up at the city's outskirts.

The northern half of Burroughs, with the exception of the Grand Nublarian whose still intact vast halls were a refuge for a large number of visitors, had been evacuated and only essential staff remained there. All the visitors and non-essential employees had been gathered in the southern half, mainly in and around the Lost Valley Palace. As for those still in Cartago Valley, trucks had been sent to pick them up along with J-SEC officers and keepers to ensure their safety.

With the city now being associated with death, Dearing didn't want to return there and Grady realized that. Since she had to go back to his bungalow to retrieve her car and her sandals, he offered her to stay for dinner, an offer which she accepted.

When they reached his bungalow, the sun had passed behind the Western Cordillera and everywhere the Sibo hadn't spread its shadow, stars were shining in the sky.  
They were not alone in the village since it was illuminated by the lights coming from other bungalows and they saw a jeep moving in the darkness, taking a nearby street.

On the other side of the Long Lake, the Reserve's animals were letting out calls and bellows. Grady listened to them before opening the door of his bungalow.

During the earthquake, a few books had fallen off the shelves and frames had been unhooked from the wall. Fearing more serious damage, he began by making a quick tour of his home, checking for leaks or anything else that could pose a risk.  
He then went into the kitchen and inspected the hotplates and the fridge. They were functional.

Once it was done, he came back to his guests:

"If you want to stay alone for a moment, you can go in my room. I will ask the boys to help me prepare dinner," he suggested to Dearing.

"Thank you Owen."

She went to his room and he turned to Zach and Gray.

"You're okay?" He asked them.

"I think…" Zach replied with an uncertain look.

Gray replied with a small nod.

"Ok. While your aunt is resting, let's make dinner. I don't know what you had eaten at noon back in the jungle but you must be starving… If the three of us start now, it will be ready in half an hour. Don't hesitate to take a fruit to calm your hunger," the keeper told them, pointing to the fruit basket on one of the kitchen's worktops.

While Grady was cutting chicken fillets and Zach stirring onion and celery in a wok, Gray had been tasked with preparing the table.

"After setting the table, you can rest a little, Gray," Grady said. "Two are enough for the remaining tasks."

Once he had set the table, Gray wandered a bit in the bungalow but feeling idle and a seeing the books littering the ground at the base of the shelves, he thought he could do a favour to their host by putting them back in the shelves.

As he did that, he had a glance at the titles.  
In addition to famous books about dinosaurs or paleontology such as Robert T. Bakker's _The Dinosaur Heresies_ , Alan Grant's _The Lost World of the Dinosaurs_ , or _The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs_ by Gregory S. Paul, there were others about zoology, ethology, Costa Rican gastronomy, Tun-Si history and culture, as well as two books discussing about InGen's scientific discoveries but each expressing a radically different opinion: Henry Wu's _The Next Step: an Evolution of God's Concepts_ , that highlighted the potential of InGen's biotechnology and explored the possibilities of creating brand new species; and Ian Malcolm's _God Creates Dinosaurs_ , a very critical book by the famous Texan mathematician on the consequences of InGen's research and activities.

Once the books were back in the shelves, his gaze turned to a set of frames hanging near the desk, right next to the _King Lear_ 's poster.  
Photos had been put in said frames, showing the achillobators in their youth, when they were hardly bigger than a chicken or a cat.  
On the one in the centre, one could saw Grady walking down a service aisle, followed by the four dinosaurs in a single line with Blue ahead; on the one on the top left, Echo was inspecting a xylophone; and the one of the top right showed Blue lying on Grady's legs, resting her head on his laps and looking towards a turned-on television.  
Those scenes were touching and Gray smiled as he looked at them, but his eyes lowered to a rather large document in a file holder below.  
Curious, he wanted to know what its content was, but before he took it, he checked that his brother and the keeper were absorbed in their respective tasks.

Grabbing the document by the spine, he took it out of the file holder and turned it over to read the cover:

 _GRADY Owen  
LORENZ Nikolaas  
SEMBÈNE Barry_

 **Integrated Behavior Raptor Intelligence Study**

 **Logbook.**

09/31/2017 version.

He opened the document and by browsing it, his eyes were immediately attracted by one of the appendices at the end, consisting of a presentation in the form of individual records, each featuring one or several pictures of the animals involved in the program.  
Gray discovered that in addition to the four _Achillobator_ he had seen pictures of, there were six other packs of four individuals each, and of a different species, _Neoraptor_ , previously erroneously called _Velociraptor_.

The first eight records were of animals that belonged to the subspecies _Neoraptor athertonii tigris_.  
In the latter, the males had an orange body striped with black and a pale white belly while the females were brown with a light grey mottling and stripes and a pale brown underbelly.  
He read the names attributed to individuals. For the males there were Priam, Hector, Paris and Aeneas while the females had been called Hecube, Andromache, Briseis and Cassandra. All names of characters from the Iliad.

Gray then moved on to the second subspecies, _Neoraptor athertonii iroquoii_ , named after the males' sagittal crest of dark grey quills.  
He thought that they were visually attractive. They had a blue-grey body with a brownish red back, and a light blue lateral stripe on each side than ran from the head to the end of the tail while two small red ridges adorned the top of the snout. The females however had a creamy white body mottled with black.  
Due to the straight and elegant posture they had on the pictures and their round pupil, the _iroquoii_ evoked more birds than the _tigris_.  
Here again, the chosen names were from Greek mythology and there were Agamemnon, Ajax, Ulysses and Achilles for the males; Clytemnestra, Hermione, Iphigenia and Electra for the females.

And finally, came the records sheets dedicated to a hybrid subspecies of the two previous ones, named _Neoraptor athertonii iroquoii x tigris_.  
The males, dark grey with a light grey underbelly, had inherited the _iroquoii_ 's quills crest and red eyes and the _tigris_ ' stripes but compared to the first, the snout's ridges and the lateral stripes were less pronounced. The females, also dark grey but mottled with black, had yellow eyes.  
The names given to the males were Heracles, Perseus, Theseus, and Bellerophon, and those to the females were Atalanta, Hippolyta, Medea, and Andromeda.

"Zach? Can you check how's Claire doing?" Grady asked at that moment. "Don't disturb her if she seems to be sleeping. Go by the patio if necessary. I just want to know what she is doing," he added in a low voice.

As he was on Andromeda's record, an information caught Gray's eye: It was written that she had been shot in mid-2013 following an incident.

Gray heard someone walking towards him.

"Gray?" Grady's voice asked on a neutral tone. "Could you replace your brother in the kitchen please?"

He closed the log book, put it down on the desk and turned around to see Grady standing a few steps away from him and looking at him with a half stern, half melancholic expression.

He had noticed that Gray was reading Andromeda's record and the boy realized that it made the keeper feel uncomfortable that he discovered that one of the neoraptors of his research program had died.

"Yes, Mr Grady," Gray nervously replied.

As they returned to the kitchen where rice was starting to cook in the wok, Grady told him:

"You can call me Owen."

Twenty minutes later, dinner was ready and Grady went to told Dearing about that.  
She arrived soon after and the four sat down at the table, the boys facing each other, Grady back to the kitchen and Dearing facing him. Her eyes laid upon the food on the table and as she was hunger-stricken, her haggard look lighted up a little.  
He and the boys had prepared pieces of spiced chicken and a plate of _Arroz Navideño_ , also known as Christmas rice, garnished with parsley, prunes, crushed almonds, celery and whose curry scents diffused in the whole room. For dessert, they had put some fruit on the counter.

"I know it's not a good old turkey. I had planned to go to the feast that was organized for tonight so I did with what I had," Grady said, talking about the main course.

He became silent for a moment, thinking about what he would say next.

"I'm aware that the adjective is not really appropriate but Merry Christmas," the keeper added after a sigh. "Enjoy your meal."

"Enjoy your meal," they said back, feebly.

They served themselves and dined with an undisguised appetite.

However, none of them desired to speak and the meal proceeded in a complete silence that was only disturbed by the distant sounds of the eruption and the occasional calls of some dinosaur, let out in the darkness of the night.


	79. Prometheus' fault

After the meeting with the board of directors, Wu had immediately returned to the laboratories in order to implement there the instructions of the operation Fallen Kingdom.

While the lab technicians cleared the aisles after the earthquake damage and secured the dangerous products, the geneticists were preparing the largest equipment items for transport and disassembling others. Others were delicately removing the eggs from the incubators and the embryos from their storage units to place them in stuffed boxes and containers with refrigerated compartments respectively.  
At the exit of the laboratory, an assistant had been tasked with keeping a register of evacuated assets.

When he wanted to go to his office, Wu noticed something unusual: The door was ajar while he hadn't been there for the entire day.

"Excuse me. Has anyone been in my office today?" He asked the laboratory staff aloud.

"No one, Henry," one of the geneticist replied. "You were the only one to have the keys. The door was like that when we arrived," she added.

"It was closed however when we had to evacuate…," one of the laboratory technicians told him.

"Are you sure about what you are saying?" Wu worried.

"Absolutely certain, professor," the technician affirmed.

This information troubled Wu to the highest degree. He took his phone out of his jeans' pocket.

"I have to call Bailey..." he said to his subordinates.

He dialled the J-SEC captain's number and waited for him to answer:

"Auguste? Could you have a look on the labs' CCTV footage? I think someone broke into my office."

" _Ok, professor. I'm on it._ "

"Professor!" One of the technicians hailed him. "I think you would like to come and see this..."

The technician was staring at the security camera opposite of the door of Wu's office. Looking closely, Wu saw an orange spot on the lens.

" _It's strange Professor but nearly at the same time as the beginning of the Hell Storks' attack, something covered the lens and would still be there_ ," Bailey said.

"We just discovered what," Wu told him, "paint."

" _Paint?!_ " Bailed repeated, disconcerted. " _I send you someone to make it all clear._ " _ **  
**_

Five minutes later, an officer arrived and verified with Wu if nothing had been stolen.

While the officer, a plump young man with a juvenile face, was inspecting the other cameras in the laboratory as well as those in the corridor overlooking the latter, where the visitors walked during their visit, Wu made sure to check that no files on the computer had been deleted.

As they were all still there, he relaxed but the officer came back to tell him that the camera in the tour corridor and another in the laboratory also had their lenses covered with paint.

Unable to continue his investigation for the moment due to a lack of elements, the officer left and Wu pondered for the rest of the evening about the breaking in his office and the cameras' deterioration.

X

At about six pm, he was told of the arrival of the truck that was going to transport the assets to the east docks.

"The _Anne B_ will be at the docks in one hour. We can begin to put the equipment in the truck. Be very careful with the eggs and the embryos! We will also have to delete everything on the servers before leaving," Wu commanded.

The lab technicians nodded, but as he was about to help them load the truck, his phone rang.

"I'll be back…,"

Moving away from the agitation that had gained much of the laboratory, Wu went to isolate himself in his office, picking up the call on the way:

"Henry Wu's speaking, I'm listening."

" _Good evening, Professor Wu_ ," said the voice of a man.

"Good evening," the geneticist replied in a neutral tone. "May I ask to whom I am speaking?"

" _We met a long time ago_ ," the man, who seemed to be about the same age as Wu, said, " _when we were both genetics students at Stanford under the supervision of the late Norman Atherton_."

"We were more than two at the time," Wu reminded him. "If we knew each other then I think I don't remember you anymore, sorry." _ **  
**_

" _That's alright, my identity doesn't matter but if we were face to face, you would recognize me right away. I always had a great interest in your work and InGen's activities. It is really regrettable that the company is threatened again…_ "

"Go straight to the point Sir, my time is precious," Wu said with some impatience.

" _If I called you, it is to make you an offer that you cannot refuse._ "

"What does this offer consist of?" Wu asked only out of politeness. "I must tell you that I am not chasing money."

" _I simply suggest you to join the company I work for. As you just reminded me and as I already knew, you don't care about money. So I won't use this argument to convince you to join us._ " _ **  
**_

"I'm listening…"

" _Let's face it: Jurassic World is over and with it, one of InGen's biggest revenue source_ ," his interlocutor exposed. " _John Hammond's legacy is nothing but flames, ashes, ruins, blood and vultures squabbling over its remains. Because of the large amount of dead and wounded on your hands, the eyes of the world have turned towards you. Did you put on the television or consult social media? People are only discussing about this! The current disaster is being experienced as a shock similar to the one caused by those Islamist attacks in Paris two years ago. The San Diego's incident looks like your average loose zoo animal story compared to it…_ "

Wu hadn't had the opportunity to turn on the television and put a news channel or go on the internet and check out news sites.  
He knew that at the same time, Hoskins was talking to reporters who had jumped in the first helicopter to cover the crisis, but the geneticist didn't knew anything about the reactions around the world to the disaster. This contrasted sharply with the 1993 incident, which was first considered as a hoax.

" _At the end of this unprecedented crisis and once it would have finished to pay for all the damages and deaths, the giant with feet of clay that is InGen will be much weakened, even if it is still supported by Masrani Global,"_ the man carried on _. "The board is naïve to believe that the fruit of the operation Fallen Kingdom will save InGen from total ruin. They will only delay the inevitable at best. What is the point, dear colleague, to fill with water a holed barrel while your efforts could be used elsewhere for the better? Staying at InGen would ruin your talent. With us, you would have carte blanche concerning your creations and zero bill of specifications delivered by some uptight bureaucrat who don't understand anything about the talent of the artists of life that we are._ "

As what his interlocutor was saying was far from being baseless, Wu's attention increased and when he had mentioned the possibility of having carte blanche and the absence of a bill of specifications, Wu had been almost seduced by the offer.

" _I have heard things about the Indominus rex, your latest creation, many things. A real revolution in the field of genetic engineering. A new species of dinosaur in its own right. Large, powerful, of an appalling savagery and an intelligence almost unmatched in the Animal Kingdom, as it is able to thwart the plans made to stop it by using extraordinary abilities like camouflage. You took big risks and shown audacity when you designed it, Henry, I like this. I can only be impressed._ "

Seduction had given way to consternation when the man had mentioned the camouflage. The mere fact that he was in possession of such information about the Indominus was frightening.

"How the hell do you know about the Indominus' camouflage?" Wu asked him on an alarmed tone.

He looked out of his office to make sure that there was no indiscreet listeners nearby.

"Before today, we were only a handful at InGen to know that she had this ability," he added in a low voice.

" _As I told you, I am attentive to your research. Knowledge is power and to have it, I have deployed all the necessary means. Victor Hoskins is not the only one to send spies to competition you see… Thus, I know even some of InGen's best kept little secrets, including one for which you have taken all the precautions you deemed necessary. You can fool Claire Dearing, Simon Masrani, Victor Hoskins, InGen's board of directors, the media or the masses… But not me_ ," his interlocutor declared not without arrogance.

He paused.

" _Do you know the story of Prometheus, professor?_ " He suddenly asked.

"Yes, of course," Wu said quite coldly.

" _In this case, I will spare you the details. I would just like to ask you why he ends up chained to a rock so that an eagle can comes each day to devour his liver? I don't remember that part much, you know…_ "

Wu's interlocutor knew the answer. He just wanted to hear Wu say it, as if he wanted him to realize something.

"Because he stole fire from the Gods to give it to Men," Wu answered.

" _Ah, now I remember! Yes indeed, the Gods are quick to punish all those who attempt to raise their creations… I let you think about my offer as long as you wish. When the time comes, you will make the right decision. You will end up joining us, I'm sure of it. If necessary, call me back at this number. Merry Christmas, professor_." _ **  
**_  
The man finished his call and Wu leaned back in his chair, deeply troubled by this discussion.

His brain was dwelling on one particular sentence, " _…the Gods are quick to punish all those who attempt to raise their creations…_ ".  
The choice to mention the fault and the fate of Prometheus was far from being insignificant in the context of their conversation and now knowing what kind of information the man seemed to be in possession of, Wu realized that it was actually a threat.  
If he didn't seriously consider the offer or if he opposed this mysterious geneticist instead of working with him, then there was a strong risk that the entire genomic map of the Indominus would be sent to the media or an institution tasked with ensuring bioethical regulations.  
He had gone far with the Indominus, way too far and he knew it. He was starting to regret it. Being her creator, he naturally thought he was the only holder of sensitive information about her.  
If ever the truth came out, then it will be the end of his career and he was good to appear in court.

It was with trembling hands that he put down his cell, haunted by the idea.

As he tried to relax by pacing back and forth, he saw, through the window that allowed him to observe the laboratory from his office, Hoskins climbing down the metal staircase that led in the lab.  
The director of the security division was on the phone and when Wu opened the door of his office, he realized that the person at the other end of the line was his daughter.

"Try to have a Merry Christmas anyway, sweetie," her father wished to her. "Give Haytham my regards. I'll call you back tomorrow as soon as I could. Bye."

Hoskins put his phone in his pocket and went to Henry Wu's office.

Seeing the professor seated behind his desk, looking thoughtful, he knocked.

"Am I disturbing you, Professor?"

"No. Please Vic, come in."

He came in and leaned against the door frame. He seemed worried. He let out a heavy sigh.

"These are uncertain times that comes, with their lot of sacrifices and concessions," Hoskins said. "InGen will take years to recover from this crisis. Jeff Rossiter and Amelia Grendel must be jubilating like cartoons villains in front of their screen as they see the value of ours holdings tumbling down. The employees are scared, Henry, afraid for their jobs, their future. Some of the keepers refuse to evacuate and want to stay with the animals until the end despite the threat of the volcano and the escaped creatures. Do you know what I told them? The suitcase or the coffin. The suitcase or the coffin…"

Hoskins walked to the window that overlooked the laboratory.

"I'm afraid that your division will also be affected by the looming wave of layoffs. Among our geneticists, how many will be recruited by our rivals?" He wondered with his voice hinting clearly that he feared the consequences.

He turned to Wu.

"Tell me, you won't be one of those? Reassure me."

The geneticist was still haunted by the telephone conversation he just had. Putting aside the underlying threat in some of his interlocutor's words, he knew that he might have been right when he said that InGen was doomed.  
For a second, he wanted to inform Hoskins that an individual working for the competition had just contacted him and tell him the exchange he had but not knowing how far his contact's arm extended and who was in his pay within InGen, he preferred to refrain from doing this.

"I worked all my life for InGen. I would have the impression of betraying John Hammond's memory by leaving the company of my own free will," he said.

"The good old John Hammond… He must be looking at us from up above, shaking his head while wondering what we did to end up like this. When I look at what the events had done to Masrani… I'm afraid that if he had been in his place, Hammond would have died on the spot of a broken heart."

By imagining John Hammond's reaction to the disaster and Masrani's current mental state, Wu felt his chest and throat tighten.

"How is Simon?"

"Not very good to be honest," Hoskins replied. "He has fallen into a state of mutism and refuses to drink or eat. He was so flamboyant before and now he is an empty shell… I will try to see him during the evening. Despite the argument you had, you should perhaps do the same if you have time. He is still your friend."

 _What kind of friend am I?  
_ This question crossed the mind of the geneticist. His own pride had costed him the friendship and respect of Simon Masrani.

Looking through the open door, he saw men dressed in fatigues walking into the laboratory. He noticed that they were armed with assault rifles and semi-automatic handguns.

"What are those men doing here?"

Just before Hoskins visited Wu, the director of the security division had gone to the rendezvous point with the second wave of reinforcements sent from InGen Security's base in Costa Rica, the first being the Slayers and the third planned to arrive with the _Arcadia_.  
Two _Boeing CH-47 Chinook_ and one _AgustaWestland EH101 Merlin_ had dropped two _BAE Caiman_ , a hummer, as well as about fifty mercenaries and all the equipment that could be provided to them. While the two _CH-47 Chinook_ had headed back to the mainland, the _EH101 Merlin_ stayed on the island.

"It's for your safety. It should dissuade those who want to harm you. If you want to go out, make sure that you are escorted because take this like you want but you became a target and a subject of covetousness."

Wu knew that the intrusion into his home of Lieutenant Brunet and Warrant Officer Darbinian of the Grey Guard and the ensuing aggression had something to do with this decision.

"You are a key asset of InGen, Henry, don't forget it and it is imperative that we ensure that you leave this island along with your work. These men will also help you in evacuating the labs. Once he will be done in the control room, Commander Torres will come down here to oversee the whole thing. By midnight at the latest, you must be in the helicopter and en route to the mainland. Understood?"

"Midnight? But that leaves us only about six hours. Are you worried that the ash cloud prevent our aircrafts to take off beyond that time?"

"Yes, but that's not the main reason. You need to leave as soon as possible as long as the situation is stabilized here. Something is telling me that it's going to be a long night. Don't worry, if there is something of value left here, I will make sure that no one takes it…"


	80. Shelter

Gods can bleed.  
The Indominus had discovered this in her youth, the day she had almost tore off the arm of one of the keepers.  
The mythical aura that she had given to the members of the race who had created her had definitively disappeared that day, even if the memories of her birth in a special room of the Norman Atherton laboratories were still there and gave her nightmares in her sleep.  
Throughout her life in captivity, she had wondered about why the men were free and not her. She had found the answer that day. She was stronger than them and they knew it. They were afraid of her and how much.

All those she had encountered during her escape had ended up helpless before her. By grabbing them between her jaws or her fingers, she had noticed their fragility and rapidly, she had developed a taste for massacres since they allowed her to unwind and evacuate all the frustration she had accumulated during her life.  
Feeling the flesh tear between her teeth, the blood moisten her maw, her claws shredding skin and organs, her jaws crushing bones… All of this had the effect of a drug, just like the heady scent that had led her right on the guards. Frightening the latter with her ability to blend within her environment, an ability she had discovered when she was young during a rodent hunt, had been almost like a game for her.

As for the dinosaurs, she only had a secondary interest in them. They were either too fast and agile, too big and dangerous, or the individuals tended to stick together when confronted to a threat.  
Thus, the Indominus had avoided them most of the time and the only confrontation which she couldn't have avoided was the one with that overconfident young male apatosaur when she left the wood as the sun was at its highest in the sky. The herbivore had charged her on sight and she barely had avoided the spikes that lined his neck, spikes that had left a series of small wounds on the upper part of her right side and back. At the end of a brief battle, she had managed to defeat him and had done little more than abandoning his corpse to scavengers.

The only time she had felt in danger was when the metal bird chased her and cornered her against the aviary while the great mountain roared.

Fleeing its wrath, the Indominus had returned in the Reserve and when arrived near the now buried ruins of the old Visitor Center, she turned east, passing next to the remains of an old basalt arch covered with creepers.

From the top of the ridge that barred the western end of the Embrace, she saw a mountain with jagged edges and a pointed summit in the east, beyond the valley and the cluster of hills covered by the jungle.  
She then thought that she could find a refuge in its shadow and she went down to the Embrace.

During her journey, she saw the verdurous valley being little by little covered with ash and gradually turn into a grey desert.  
The valley having been abandoned by its inhabitants, the Indominus was alone between the two mountain arches that stood on either side. For a human being, the feeling of isolation that prevailed there was such that it would have been oppressive.

The only thing of interest which broke the monotony of the Indominus' walk was to pass by the _Pegasus_ ' steaming carcass.  
That was another threat gone, but during the stand at the base of the aviary, the metal bird had thrust its sting in her shoulder. The sting was still there and if she moved her arm a bit too briskly, she felt pain.

The more the ash fell, the drier the air became, making her thirsty. She had to find water.  
There was a stream flowing in the middle of the valley but when she leaned over it, the Indominus realized that the ash fall had already soiled it.  
To find a cleaner water, she had to move and look where ashes couldn't fall or haven't yet fall.

Reaching the gates of the valley, she was in sight of the landslide that had taken away a part of the Limes.  
The fence was now nothing but scraps at this level, in addition of being half buried.

The Indominus followed the slide and once at its top, she turned to her left to head to the breach.  
At this level, she saw footprints of several different herbivores in the ash, mainly those of _Parasaurolophus_ and _Gallimimus_ , leading out of the Reserve, in the sector beyond.

She crossed the breach and continued south-east.

Her ascent of the slopes of the northern summit of the Misty Mounts began rapidly enough among large trees, whose shadows she left after a while to take a narrow rocky ridge that led higher in the mountain. She stopped to turn and watch for a moment the sun setting beyond the screen formed by the ash cloud.

A little further on the ridge, she had a viewpoint that overlooked a complex of several austere concrete buildings and enclosures delimited by high fences that occupied the bottom of a small valley in the shadow of the mountain and surrounded on all sides by dense jungle. The quarantine paddocks.  
The place was familiar to her. It was there that she had lived the first months of her life before being transported to the cirque.  
A look north made her see that her second home, the Coliseum, was nothing more than a small prominent mass on a hilltop. The surrounding forest fires made it look like a besieged castle. Between the enclosures, the Indominus saw the headlights of a moving vehicle: men were still there, patrolling as darkness fell.

She resumed her ascent but in the middle of it, the Indominus almost lost her balance.  
Her mind was muddled and a feel of nausea struck her.

She eventually vomited, leaving among the rocks the half-digested body of one of the truck's passengers.  
The Indominus waited for her condition to stabilize and proceeded.

At nightfall, she reached the edge of an oval pool dominated by a high waterfall and lit by the moonlight.

She walked to the water and seeing that it was unsullied, she quenched her thirst, half-opening her mouth to let a certain amount of water in before arching her neck back and let it fall down into her oesophagus.

The contact of water with her amputated tongue created a very unpleasant sensation, painful even. Another injury, inflicted by the female human with fiery hairs.

She knew the latter and recognized her smell, similar to those of the flowers that blossomed in the jungle, and her face among all those of her race.  
At the exit of the mother-tank, she was the first living being that the Indominus saw as she came into the world. She remembered that the sight of her face covered by an antibacterial protective mask and her green eyes looking covetously at the frail creature she was had scared her. But as the Indominus grew, this relationship had been reversed and the predator had realized it during the test showings where the human didn't dared to look at her in the face. How ironic.

But as she was drinking, it was then that she saw her reflection for the first time.  
At first, she was frightened and clawed the water to chase the being that was looking at her from the bottom of the pool but when she noticed that the latter was imitating her moves, curiosity supplanted fear and she looked at it carefully.

She tilted her head sideways, first to the left, then to the right and saw that it copied her gesture to perfection.  
She also saw that it too had a sting thrust in its shoulder and realized that she couldn't leave hers in her flesh. It had to be removed.

She closed the fingers of her right hand around the harpoon and pulled, but the pain was such that she staggered and fell on her side in the middle of the rocky bank.

As she was panting, exhaustion threatened to make her pass out but she couldn't allow that to happen in an exposed place like this one. What would men do to her if they found her like this, at their mercy? She now had to find shelter.

A few minutes later, she slowly got up and stepped into the pool until water reached her underbelly. She had felt a slight draught, coming from beyond the waterfall. A cave was behind perhaps. Shelter.

The Indominus immersed her arms, washing the blood on them.


	81. Alcohol and Treatments

Passing her hands under the tap, Dearing washed them.

While her nephews had gone to the guest room, she had stayed to help Grady clean the dishes.  
He had asked her if she would like to stay there until he leave to help his colleagues after a few hours of rest, suspecting that she still wouldn't like to go back to Burroughs.

Unsurprisingly, her response had been positive and she went to inform her nephews.  
But when she opened the door of the guest room a little, she saw that they were lying on the bed, still dressed as they had directly fallen asleep after dinner.

She gently closed the door and went to meet Grady on the patio.

He sat beer in hand in one of the two rocking chairs under the canopy that sheltered this part of the patio.  
Seeing her arrive, he uncapped a beer and handed it to her.

"Hey. I thought you might need one."

"Thank you."

She came to sit on the other chair and started to drink her beer while giving a worried glance around.

Two camping lanterns diffused a rather soothing light at their level, but said light gave way to darkness a few meters ahead.  
Thus, they barely made out the outlines of the lake they were facing, even if it was really close, and were not able to see the dinosaurs whose calls sounded like a lament.

"Where are they?"

"Beyond the opposite shore of the lake. I think they will only cross if the eruption increases in intensity."

From the patio, they could see the sky raging over the volcano.

"How long do you think it will last?"

"I don't know. It could end tomorrow morning or in three weeks or even in several months."

Grady looked at the way the foliage of the nearby trees moved in the wind.

"The wind is repelling the plume eastward but we have to keep an eye on this. The bungalow must be evacuated if the ash layer on the roof becomes too thick."

He saw that she was holding her ring between her fingers, turning it.

"I never asked you but what is the story behind that ring?"

"It's just an ex's gift, from when I was still in Florida," Dearing replied. "He was a tall man with long hairs, an angelic face, a smooth voice and an unparalleled eloquence. Our relation wasn't long and when we broke up shortly before my job interview at InGen's headquarters, things went simply. He was even very understanding and told me that he was satisfied with what we had and that's when he offered me this ring. _May this ring bring you luck in your future endeavours_ , he had wished to me. He had forged and decorated it himself, the guy being a craftsman. I don't know what he became but until this day, his ring has indeed rather brought me luck."

She turned to him.

"What do you think destiny has planned for you after this," she asked him.

"Even if the board wanted to get rid of me, Hoskins would remind them that they need me for the program's sake. The girls are too precious in the eyes of the company to be abandoned here. The IBRIS program is moved to the mainland. Barry and the guys are preparing the transfer."

He took a sip of beer and remained silent for a few seconds, as if hesitating to say something.

"Social conventions invite me to return you the question. Do you have a backup plan for the rest of your professional life?" He finally asked.

"No. Since my name is now associated with the fall of this park, all the résumés I will sent will be directly thrown in the trash. And don't count on the board to help me. The meeting looked like a Bolsheviks trial. I'm in shit up to the nostrils…"

She finished her beer and Grady got up and went to the kitchen.

When he came back, it was with two glasses and a small bottle of rum in his hands. He offered some to his guest and she accepted.

"I managed to put a lot of money aside during all these years but it had originally another purpose than to help me sort things out in case of a big mishap in my life," she said after taking a sip.

"Which was it then?"

She looked him in the eyes.

"Can I tell you a secret?"

While looking at her in the eyes, he nodded seriously.

"It's about family. My half-sister, other relatives and some colleagues believe that I don't want to have children. That's what I make them believe but actually, it's not totally true," she admitted.

A surprised air appeared on his face.

"Don't start to believe that it's because I have no professional future that I fall back on children, kitchen, church… No, no, not at all, there is no fucking connection!" She clarified nonetheless. "It's more to have someone to bequeath a legacy to or, more down-to-earth, to transmit my blood and genes if you prefer. Thus, the money put aside aimed to fund the studies of my potential kid. But on the other hand, I was hesitating because the world is changing and not for the better, today's events made me well understand that in a certain way. How will it look like in fifteen, thirty, fifty years? Will it still be a place where one can grow and blossom safely and peacefully?"

She noticed that Grady had listened to her very carefully and that his attitude towards her had radically changed along the whole day, less mocking and more benevolent and full of understanding.

As she took another sip, he wanted to move in his chair but he suddenly grunted.

"Ow."

"You're okay?" Dearing worried.

"It's nothing."

She knew that it was the wound at his side that hurt him.

"Did you treat your wound?"

"I just washed it quickly."

Dearing rolled her eyes.

"Oh, you're impossible!"

She got up from her chair and invited him to do the same.

"Let's go in your room. We have to look at it!"

Grady stood up and went to open the French window between the patio and his room.

Once they were both inside, Dearing closed behind them.

"Thinking to treat my wounds is fine but who's gonna treat yours?" She said while he was sitting on his bed. "Come on, take off your shirt!"

Grady put down his drink and complied while she looked for some 90 percent alcohol in the bathroom's medicine chest.  
She eventually found a bottle and came back with the necessary to bandage the wound.

She sat next to him and began to apply a cotton wool moistened with alcohol on the cut, making him wince.  
Once the wound disinfected, Dearing bandaged it and grabbed her drink.

"I hope it will be fine for now," she said before taking another sip of rum. "Promise me to see a doctor as soon as you can. To say that if I hadn't looked at his, you would have ended up with an infection. You can thank me."

"Thank you," Grady said.

As they took off their shoes, he let out a little laugh.

"Why are you laughing?" She asked him.

"It's just funny. We spent the last five hours saving each other and mutually treating our wounds," he reminded her. "In truth," he added shortly after, "you are a woman full of potential, Mrs Dearing. Definitely not a Willie Scott!"

She smiled to him a little.

"So, am I rather a Marion Ravenwood?"

"You're getting a little closer to one, yes."

He started to count on his fingers.

"What are you doing?" She asked him.

"Counting. I saved you three times and you saved me twice."

Dearing frowned and looked at him sceptically.

"What do you mean you saved me three times? You caught me on the Giant's Fist stairs and got me out of my state of shock in that corridor of the old center, but which was the third?"

"My idea to climb the walls of the cave."

She widened her eyes out of consternation.

"Your idea? _The Emperor's New Groove_ writers' idea first and foremost, you plagiarist!" She retorted, a bit loudly because of the alcohol's influence. "And it doesn't fit into the concept of saving someone from an immediate danger. While awaiting developments, I did the most badass things! I saved you from a voracious pterosaur and heck, I managed to wound the Indominus. This count for two at least! I sliced her tongue like Red Sonja cut off heads! It's something else than catching me in time or pulling my arm," she said mockingly.

They ended up laughing at themselves despite the exhaustion and the hardships they had experienced.

"Easy," Grady calmed her while laughing, "your nephews are sleeping."

"Oops, I forgot about that," she said. "And thinking about it, I didn't looked good back in the cave."

Their eyes met and he thought about that moment back in the Chicxulub, after she had saved him from the _Harpactognathus_ ' jaws, when he had been tempted to kiss her.  
The events had brought them closer and Dearing's various moments of bravery had generated a great attraction in him for his ex-boss.  
Thus, driven by the idea that it was surely the last evening they were going to share and partly because of the drinks he had, he moved closer to her face and kissed her lips.

It was brief, however, because he realized that maybe it was too much and he backed away, ready to apologize.

Dearing had been surprised but she hadn't moved back and judging by her look, she wondered why he had stopped.

Even before he had time to apologize, she moved closed and kissed him lengthily in return.

He responded with passion and she turned to pass a leg over his and sit on his lap.

Noting that he desired her greatly, she unbuttoned her pants and gently pushed him back, lying him on his back.

She straddled him and leaned down to kiss him and he passed his hands under her blouse, fondling first her lower back and then gradually moving them up towards her chest.


	82. Reinforcements

"Reinforcements from Sorna!" Corporal Chapuy shouted from the barracks' roof when he saw the lights of a transport helicopter beginning to descend towards the valley.

When Brunet arrived on the roof, the aircraft, an _AgustaWestland EH101 Merlin_ bearing the five stars and the dragon of the Grey Guard, had already landed and its passengers, around thirty fully equipped guards, were disembarking.

The individual at the head of this platoon, a tall middle-aged Chinese man, Lieutenant Zhuge Yu, headed to Brunet.

The latter hailed him over the noise of engines and rotating blades:

"Zhuge."

"Gilbert."

The two men greeted each other by grasping firmly the right forearm of the other with their right hand.

Brunet watched the helicopter take off immediately once all its passengers had landed.  
He had expected more reinforcements.  
Yu saw his concern in his eyes.

"Be assured, Helm does not intend to only send my platoon to help you. A larger expeditionary force is being assembled at Caer Draig but as the ash cloud is about to cover the entire island, our transport helicopters won't be able to fly over it."

The winds that had pushed the ash cloud eastward had lost in strength and ash was now falling also on the employee village and the barracks.

"They then embark on the _Sleipnir_ ," Brunet concluded. "They will only be here at daybreak."

"I'm afraid so. Tell me, where is Mei?"

Brunet asked his colleague to follow him and on the way, he revealed Tian's fate and the circumstances of her death.  
Once they arrived at the gymnasium, he let Yu alone for a moment with the body of his niece.

When he returned, he saw him kneeling in silence with his hands on his knees, motionless like a statue while his helmet was resting on the floor next to him.

As Brunet came behind him, passing between rows of body bags, Yu closed Tian's.

"Do you have a lead about the killers?" He asked calmly.

"We have one, yes. The nephews of the park director."

"Those who got lost in the jungle?"

"Yes. During their journey, they witnessed the execution of Mei, Patience and Turner. The eldest has reported to Hoskins what they saw," Brunet told him.

Yu stood up and turned to him.  
Brunet saw that his eyes were not fogged but he knew that his colleague had his own way of grieving, all in restraint.  
However, he saw in his eyes that he greatly wanted to know the truth.

"Zhuge. I swear you that I will not let these kids leave the island without telling us everything they know. If we found the culprits, justice will be done," he promised.

"Thank you, Gilbert. Where are they now?"

"They are at Owen Grady's place with their aunt. I sent someone to keep an eye on them, in order to not lose them but also to make sure that nothing happens to them."

Yu raised an eyebrow.

"You suspect the presence of a mole?" He asked his colleague in a low voice.

"The spy drone, the gas, the murders ... All this is connected. Those who pull the strings knew exactly what we were doing and were following our moves."

"So the mole is either an InGen employee, either someone within our own ranks?"

"These are the only two possibilities that I see. Let Dearing's nephews rest for the moment, but at the first opportunity, we'll go talk to them."

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _Hypothetical casting:_

 _ **Qianyuan Wang** as Zhuge Yu_


	83. Green Light

"Sir? Excuse me for interrupting your sleep but the quarantine paddocks have just been attacked," one of the control room's technician announced.

It was already past nine thirty, and Hoskins, then asleep in one of the armchairs in the break room, widened his eyes and sat up.

"What?!"

He got up and followed the technician to the control room.

In one corner of the main screen, the status of the J-SEC officers assigned to the quarantine paddocks had been displayed in red.

CAMPBELL B. Deceased  
DE LORENZO D. Deceased  
SANTIAGO R. Deceased

On the real-time map occupying the rest of the screen, a zoom was made on an area that encompassed the northern summit of the Misty Mounts, its slopes and the surrounding jungle, up to the Jungle Trading Post further south.  
Among the dozens of bright dots corresponding to the animals in the area, Hoskins noticed that about thirty of them were heading east, climbing the slopes of the mountain.

The technician who fetched the director of the security division came back to him with a tablet in his hands and showed him the footage of the quarantine paddocks' CCTV cameras. Hoskins saw the mauled bodies of two of the officers, lying across the paths, and that the paddocks' gates had been rammed or torn from their hinges.

"I have a video call from Mrs. Lynton!" Cruthers said.

"Put it on the screen," Hoskins ordered.

Cruthers nodded and a window appeared on the main screen.

Susan Lynton appeared shortly after in the middle of said window.  
She was sitting again in the meeting room, but unlike the earlier communication, only InGen's Vice President could be seen as she had made the call from her laptop.

"So it seems that the Indominus has manifested again," she declared. "You now know in which area she is. So don't waste time and send the Slayers! All of them." She added with authority.

Hoskins complied but once he informed the Slayers, Lynton added:

"Victor? I looked over your reports on the IBRIS program and read about your ideas and suggestions regarding the application of its research. I think you have there the opportunity to perform a field test. Thus, I announce that you have my green light and the one of the board. Good luck."


	84. A short sleep

Dearing and Grady had fallen asleep just after their lovemaking, one against the other, with their naked bodies shivering in the freshness of the night.  
They had enjoyed the moments they had shared since those had brought comfort and pleasure to both of them.

But their sleep wasn't long since it was disturbed by a ringing sound, made by his phone.

He woke up first, and when Dearing opened her eyes, she noticed that he was standing near the chest drawer, with his back facing her, covered with long scars, inflicted by Andromeda's claws years earlier.  
Then, with his phone on his ear, listening attentively to what was being said to him, he began to nervously pace in the room like a caged beast.

She looked at the time on the clock radio: 9:50 pm.  
They had slept barely over two hours.

"The six groups?! And the procera too?!" He exclaimed. "Fucking hell…"

Grady continued to listen to his colleague.

"Stay alert," he told him at one point.

" _Wait, an helicopter is coming…_ " Sembène's voice said shortly after.

He had a moment of silence before he spoke again:

" _It's Hoskins' elite troops_!"

Grady froze and clenched his fists.

"I'll be on my way, Barry," he said in an alarmed tone.

Grady hung up, put his phone on top of the chest of drawers and grabbed his clothes.

"We have to leave. I must return to the achillobators' paddock."

"I'll go with you," she suggested while she was putting her clothes back on.

He turned to her.

"You can but the boys not. They had their share of dinosaurs and jungle for today. They will be safer at the Administration."

Once she finished getting dressed, Dearing went to wake up the boys and five minutes later, they were all in the jeep.

As they drove to the Administration, Dearing called Cruthers to inform them that they were going to drop off her nephews there.

The chief technician told her that he will someone at the building's entrance right away to wait for them and while he had her at the other end of the line, he informed her that Hoskins and most of InGen's troops had left for the achillobators' paddock, to implement a plan that the board had just approved, something she and Grady already knew thanks to Sembène's call.

By looking in the rear-view mirror, she saw the headlights of a motorbike behind them, with its beams stopping just before the back of the jeep.  
She couldn't tell who it was, and the bike followed them to the Administration.

As they were getting out of their vehicle, Dearing looked for it but has the motorbike's headlights had been turned off, she couldn't with the darkness around them.

Not caring much about this, she accompanied her nephews up to the door, leaving them with Krill and promising them to return as soon as possible before heading back to the jeep.


	85. Takeover

While the windshield wipers swept the ashes that fell on the windshield, Grady was looking straight towards him, to the road that led to the achillobator paddock and he frequently glanced at the thick vegetation on both sides.  
Because of the ongoing ash fall, the foliage had started to have a greyish colour and on the road itself, one could clearly notice the tracks left by the wheels of InGen's vehicles on the thin layer of ash.

After crossing the southeastern part of the Reserve, they came out of it not far from the Pteratops Lodge and the Cartago's aviary. When he had to go out of the vehicle to open and close the gate, Grady hadn't been comfortable at all since not only the volcanic plume had plunged this part of the island into complete darkness but the ash fall was stronger there than in the south, reducing their visibility, and above all, several of the sector five's animals, including large predators who could have easily destroyed their vehicle, were out of containment due to the earthquake damage and now freely lurked in the jungle.

When the lights of the achillobator enclosure and the nearby structures appeared behind the foliage just before a road turn, the feeling of danger that had followed Grady and Dearing along their way gave way to stupor and, in the case of the first, anger when they were about to drive out of the jungle.

The place was teeming with InGen's troops. There were between thirty and forty soldiers in the kind of outpost that Hoskins had established.  
Most of them wore tactical vests and fatigue pants, even though that given the fact they were mercenaries and not a real army, clothing and equipment tended to vary between the men. Some of them, mostly Costa Ricans that had hastily joined InGen Security's base in the mainland, still whore civilians clothes while contrasting with them, a dozen of mercenaries wore an equipment worthy of a professional army, including a helmet and an array of protective gear that were partly made of metal pieces at the level of vital areas.  
In addition to all these mercenaries, they also saw the Slayers in a corner of the camp, the thirteen of them, standing right next to their helicopter.  
In the opposite end of the camp, two _BAE Caiman_ and a hummer were parked, along with two J-SEC buggies that had been requisitioned by the mercenaries.

Grady parked his vehicle between the start of the road and the paddock, and he and Dearing stepped out. Scanning the camp, he saw his co-workers, including Sembène and Leon the intern, in the paddock's large and wide lock, forced to collaborate with Hoskins' forces.  
While Sembène tried to reassure the achillobators, whispering to them in French as they had the jaws locked in metal muzzles mounted on a hydraulic system and fixed to the wall of the stalls that were used during sessions of _medical-training_ , mercenaries were strapping cameras on the right side of the raptors' heads.

Seeing Grady arrive, a small expression of relief appeared on the keepers' face but Hoskins, warned by one of his men, came out of the tent erected at the end of the camp and looked at the raptor whisperer and the ex-park director.

"Here's Cleopatra and Mark Antony," he muttered.

"What are you trying to do?!" Grady protested so loudly that he was heard throughout the camp that he reduced to silence. "Get the hell out of here and stay away from my animals!"

Sembène came out of the lock at that moment and went to support Grady.

As he finished covering the distance between him and Grady, Hoskins sighed.

"Dammit. How many more deaths do you need before this missions starts to make sense to you?!" He asked the two keepers. "When you're gonna watch the news tomorrow, you will see how you saved lives. No. Better, how your animals saved lives!"

"They have never been out of containment!" Sembène desperately tried to remind him. "This is madness!"

To hear him, anyone could have realized that the French keeper had not stopped trying to reason the director of the security division since the latter's arrival but that it had been only in vain.

Hoskins didn't cared about Sembène's opinion, neither Grady's. He had the board greenlight and a plan to stop the Indominus rex. He intended to bring it to fruition, even if it meant to put out of his way anyone who would try to stop him.

He turned to his men, who had stopped to watch the argument.

"Keep going!" He ordered.

The mercenaries resumed preparations.

"This is happening, with or without you," Hoskins told Grady and Sembène while four mercenaries arrived behind his back, ready to take the two keepers and Dearing back to Burroughs.

Out of options, Grady had no choice but to admit defeat.

"Fuck…" He growled.

He inhaled deeply.

"If we do this, we'll do this my way," the keeper declared severely. "And if ever one of them is killed, I swear I will throw you to the survivors. I wouldn't have to feed them for a week at least," he added after casting a disdainful look at Hoskins' belly.

Knowing that without Grady, the achillobators were likely to not be willing to cooperate, Hoskins couldn't have him being sent back to Burroughs, even if he just insulted and openly threatened him.  
He didn't leave this behaviour unanswered, however.

"Watch your words, man!" He retorted coldly. "Without me, the board would have dismissed you for your secretive little affair with Dearing so relax or I knock you out!"

Wanting to be done with Grady as quickly as possible, Hoskins calmed down and gave his instructions:

"Go to the tent. We're having a briefing in two minutes."

Grady gritted his teeth and exhaled through his nostrils, then he passed by Hoskins and walked towards the tent, followed by Sembène and Dearing.

Two tables had been erected under the tent.  
On the largest, in the centre, a map of the island had been unfolded, and by the other, two mercenaries were leaned over laptops. One was tasked with the proper functioning of the achillobators' cameras and the other with the communication with control room.  
A third mercenary handed Grady a small package wrapped in a cloth and as he weighed it in his hand, the leader of the Slayers came under the tent, followed by his men. He courteously introduced himself to the two keepers, then it was the turn of his men:  
There was Olivia Decker, the tall redhead with tattooed arms who acted as Sherman's right-hand woman; Damian Parker, the youngest member of the troop, a mixed-race young man in his early twenties; Léopold Butu, a native of Congo, a podgy man whose facial features evoked those of an ogre and who wore a necklace with teeth that came from the creatures he had slain, including some freshly collected on harpactognathuses and a large number that had belonged to proceratosaurs (which had earned him the nickname of Ghouls' bane); Nolan Olsen, an imposing bald man, the tallest of the Slayers, a real giant, more than two meters tall, and probably the most intimidating moreover since the lower half of his face was permanently hidden behind a muffler, hiding a wound that had severely disfigured him; Reynald Faraci, a broadly-shouldered swarthy man; two Tun-Si: Paco Cortès and Esmeralda Pizarro, a woman in her early thirties and an old friend of Cortès.  
In addition to them, there were also two Costa Ricans of Hispanic origin, Arana and Méndez, a head-shaven Sino-American named Kevin and two former marines, Ford and McNamara, Americans just like a large part of the troop.

Decker, Parker, Kevin, McNamara and the two Tun-Si stepped forward to shake hands with them, briefly but politely, but the others stayed behind, doing nothing than nodding coldly at them, even ignoring them, barely hiding their disdain for the two keepers.

Once the presentations were made, Hoskins came to join them and they gathered around the table.  
Grady and Sembène took place at one of its end and started the briefing. Dearing stood at the edge of the tent, next to the two mercenaries that were in charge of logistics and the high-tech equipment.

Grady first heard a report about how the attack on the quarantine paddocks happened, and then naturally came the question of escaped animals.

"According to the latest data received by the control room, the loose neoraptors and proceratosaurs scattered in this area," Grady said, pointing to the southwestern slope of the northern summit of the Misty Mounts. "We know that the I. rex is somewhere around this mountain. Injured following the confrontation at the quetzal aviary and fleeing the eruption, she must had sought refuge there. "

When he had pointed the mountain, several of the Slayers exchanged glances and Grady heard Cortes whisper a few words in Tun-Si.

"Something is wrong?" The keeper asked.

He was aware that, given his age, Cortes was a teen when his tribe had been evicted from Isla Nublar and so that he had learned to know the island during his childhood.  
If he knew things, he had to tell him.

"We searched the tunnels and the caves under that mountain range years ago," Cortès replied. "It's a real labyrinth. She could be anywhere."

"This is where the achillobators step in."

He placed on the table the package he had been given earlier and undid the cloth wrapped around it, revealing the piece of flesh that Hamada had picked up in the ruins of San Fernandez.

"Thanks to this, they will be able to track her. We've done that kind of drill with them many times," Grady reassured them, "but only in their paddock," he specified.

"Their sense of smell is very developed however because we assume that just like their cousins the neoraptors, they are able to smell the scent of a wounded prey from several kilometers," Sembène added.

"When they will be on target, wait before attacking," Grady said. "The achillobators are unlikely to consider the Indominus as a normal prey, we don't know what will happen so wait for my green light. You only have one target, ladies and gentlemen. Do not shoot my raptors, please."

Hoskins and Sherman then discussed about the troops' deployment in the area and agreed to separate the thirty-six mercenaries in the camp into six equally sized teams.

While five of them would also go to the mountain, two aboard the Slayer's helicopter and the others in the vehicles that would follow the achillobators, the sixth would stay to guard the camp from where the director of the security division would oversee the whole operation.

Once the plan was approved, they concluded the briefing and while the troops were preparing their weapons and vehicles, Grady asked to one of the keepers to pick his motorbike up at his bungalow.

He then went inside the lock in order to reassure his animals and seeing that Blue was agitated, he came to her and gently stroke her neck, running his fingers through her feathers.

"Easy, Blue," he said gently. "Easy gorgeous, you don't scare me."

Idle, Dearing wandered in the camp, lost in her reflections and waiting for the launch of the mission. As she was walking around, the former director passed by the Slayers, who were then checking their equipment and especially their weaponry.

Her eyes were drawn for a moment by the sword that belonged to the leader of the troop and that he was sharpening.  
Despite its sinister look, Dearing was forced to recognize that it was a beautiful piece of work and she looked at it out of the corner of her eye with great interest, as if she would have liked to touch it or even handle it.

"Do you want to hold it?" Sherman asked her suddenly in his hoarse voice, having guessed her intentions and without looking up from his weapon.

Thinking that her glance had gone unnoticed, Dearing swallowed:

"I beg your pardon?"

"My sword. I saw you laid your eyes upon it."

With the sword still in his hand, Sherman approached Dearing and handed her his weapon, placed across the open palms of his hands.

"Please. Take it," he allowed her.

Surprised, Dearing hesitated for a moment and then put a hand on the handle and grabbed it gently while being careful to keep the point of the blade oriented to the ground.  
She stepped back and weighed the sword in her hand.  
She had expected the weapon to be so heavy that she would have struggled to hold it but it hadn't been the case and she could easily raise the blade and makes small moves without being dragged forward by the weapon.

"It is lighter than I expected," she admitted.

"I asked a blacksmith friend to design it like so. Light while being able to inflict powerful blows," the leader of the Slayers explained.

Dearing bit her lip and turned to him.

"The question I'm going to ask you may seem silly but does it have a name?"

Sherman let out a small laugh.

"It is not in the least, ma'am. Its name is _Fendiserpentes_."

"The Serpent Cleaver…" Dearing murmured as she looked at the blade, her eyes sparkling with admiration. "Groovy…"

She raised the blade vertically in front of her and held the sword like it for a moment before trying to reproduce some moves she had seen in films, with varying degrees of success, which made Sherman and a part of his men laugh.

"Be careful," he warned her.

He put his hand on the handle and gently took the weapon from Dearing's hands.

"If you wish I can show you how to handle it."

"Why not?" She replied with pleasure.

He then taught her how to cut and thrust with the sword, and each time that he finished a move, he gave the sword back to her so she can reproduce it and when she made mistakes, he corrected her and gave advices.

Even if some of his men seemed to be real boors, it was obviously not his case. He didn't even asked her about the loss of her status of park director or the contempt the board gave her, like if he considered that it was none of his business.  
He was patient, courteous, and his calm voice was very soothing.

Once this improvised fencing course was over, Dearing handed the weapon back to his owner and thanked him.

"My pleasure," he said to her.

She wished him good luck for the mission and then went to see Grady, still in the paddock's lock and looking after the achillobators.

She stopped in front of the grating.

"Can I enter?" She asked him.

He nodded and she opened the door.

"Making friends with the knight Templar?" The keeper asked her with a hint of jealousy in his voice.

"It was nothing more than a small fencing course," she retorted in order to chase away his fears. "Like if we needed some unnecessary love triangle in this story."

"I'm pulling your leg. I was told that the guy was a chaplain before, so I knew that there was no risk. But one must recognize that his big sword is particularly impressive."

She noticed that despite the kindness and good he demonstrated towards her, he only half-believed in what he was saying, like if he lacked self-confidence in the moment.

She came closer to him.

"Surely but that's not a reason to put yourself down. You are the Raptor Whisperer. As far as I know, only you can claim that title."

Dearing looked at the achillobators and then to the mercenaries outside.

"Do you really want to participate in this mission?"

"I have to. I must be there to keep an eye on them. Make sure that nothing happens to them..." He added in a low voice while he stared at the ground.

Noting his anxiety, she tenderly took his hand and he looked up to her eyes.

"Be careful," she said. "Come back in one piece, okay?"

He put his other hand on hers and said:

"I'll try..."

Blue suddenly growled and hissed, making Dearing startle. When she turned to the _Achillobator_ , she noticed that she had drawn back one of her lips, showing her teeth.

"What's happening to her?" She worried.

"Oh, don't pay attention. She's just jealous," Grady reassured her. "You never knew cats unable to stomach their master's boyfriend or girlfriend?"

"None that would eviscerate me with a single swipe of claws…"

"I'm going to ask Billy McFapping to wait in the jeep with you," he told her a few moments later, talking about Leon. "It is not for him to keep an eye on you but rather the opposite," he added once he saw Dearing frown, as if she believed that he thought she was unable to handle herself even though she had proved her worth. "Park the jeep near the holding building. If ever a dangerous animal comes nearby, lock yourself in the holding cage, understood?"

She nodded.

About an hour after Grady's arrival at the camp, as the mission was about to start, Dearing returned to their jeep and sat in the driver's seat.

Seconds later, Grady arrived with the intern and asked him to get in the vehicle.

While Leon was sitting in the back, the keeper and the ex-director exchanged a few words and she wished him good luck before he went to finish the last preparations.

Dearing and Leon remained silent for a moment until the young man spoke:

"Madam Director?"

"It's just Claire now," she told him.

"Uh Claire..." Leon hesitated. "Do you think it's relevant if I relate all this in my internship report?"

Dearing chuckled.

"Well, it depends on the instructions that your teachers gave you. If your report's number of pages is not limited, I think you can. On the other hand, if things go south, avoid describing all that concerns deaths and injuries. I doubt that you'll get a good grade if one of the examinations board's members puke in a trash can after reading how Jack the mercenary died after being disembowelled by an achillobator."

Leon then truly realized the very hazardous nature of the mission and the fact that they were far from safe at this moment.

"I should have listened to my mother and do my internship at the Cincinnati Zoo with the gorillas…"

She then saw the Slayers and the mercenaries gather in the middle of the camp.

"Oh, I think it's starting."

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_

 _Hypothetical Casting:_

 _ **Guillaume Delaunay** as Nolan Olsen_


	86. The Mission

A large part of the Slayers, with the notable exception of the two Tun-Si who stood a little behind, lined up and while he recited a prayer in Latin, Sherman passed in front of each of them and blessed their weapons.

Once the prayer was done, the leader of the Slayers nodded to the pilot of their helicopter.

The latter nodded back and the aircraft took off with two teams of mercenaries on board just as planned.

It flew east, in order to fly over the area between the paddock and the mountain before dropping off one of the teams on its western slopes

The ash fall began to intensify at that moment and as a result, all those who were outside started to wear scarves, mufflers or disposable dust masks to prevent the volcanic ash' fines particles from entering into their lungs.

The outer grating of the lock was raised first, letting Grady in and he headed to the inner grating, behind which the achillobators were looking at him with great interest.

The keeper was holding in his right hand the Indominus' piece of flesh and as he moved closer to his raptors, he stretched out his arm towards the bars, allowing them to sniff the flesh and once they picked up her scent in the air, they started to get excited.

As they huddled against the grating, feeling a great need to get out of the paddock to follow the scent, Grady walked backwards, without removing his eyes from the raptors, and once he stepped out of the lock, he walked along the paddock' walls and joined the others by the vehicles, parked in the area between the paddock and the closest trees.

Everyone in the camp had been told to go there so that when the achillobators would come out of their paddock, no one would be on their path or in their field of vision, which would have triggered an unwanted and dangerous reaction from the animals and endangered the whole mission.

Grady straddled his Triumph, put his rifle over his shoulder, lifted his scarf up to his nostrils, and looked at Sembène, who sat on his motorcycle, and the rest of the hunting party, which stood next to the _BAE Caiman_ and the buggys.  
Behind, Hoskins, the group of mercenaries tasked with guarding the camp, the few keepers still there as well as Dearing and Leon in their jeep were waiting.

They told him that they were ready with a nod and they all climbed in their respective vehicles, ready to leave.

Finally, the opening' process of the inner grating was activated and before it was fully raised, the achillobators rushed forward all the same time, crossed the lock and then the camp, running without stopping, not even looking at the equipment there.

Just as they were about to disappear into the jungle, Grady started his motorcycle and left first, followed a few seconds later by Sembène and the troops.

Following the achillobators, they also faded in the jungle, letting those who remained at the camp return to the tent in order to watch on one of the laptops' screen the footage of the raptors' and the vehicles' cameras.

X

Following the achillobators' trajectory thanks to the smartwatch at his wrist, Grady slalomed in the middle of the vegetation, avoiding if possible the bushes' and shrubs' foliage in order to keep a clear view and to not have his face being whipped by leaves and twigs.

Noting that the raptors were distancing him, he accelerated to catch up, leaving the rest of the hunting party behind.

He disappeared from their sight, and when he looked at his smartwach a little further, he realized that he had gone so far that he had passed the achillobators.  
According to the screen, they were a hundred meters behind him and before he could even get off their way, they emerged from the bushes behind him and arrived at his level.

He ended up between Blue and Charlie. They passed so close to him that they could easily have grabbed his head between their jaws just by extending their neck sideways and within the blink of an eye.  
While they moved at the same speed, Blue looked curiously at her keeper before looking straight ahead.  
They were so focused on tracking down the Indominus that they paid little to no attention to him.  
The feeling he felt at that moment was strange: On one hand, he wasn't comfortable due to the potential danger of the situation, but on the other, riding with his raptors, almost as equals, had a very thrilling side and he even wished that his moment could continue like this.

However, he preferred to remain cautious and slowed down, letting them distance him.

Sembène, who had observed the scene with a wary eye, accelerated and caught up with his colleague.

A little further, he glanced at his smartwatch and noticed that the achillobators' speed was decreasing.

"They're slowing down!" He shouted to Grady.

Grady put his mouth closer to the microphone that hung at the collar of his T-Shirt:

"We're getting closer!" He informed the troops.

Finally, after driving nearly two kilometres from the paddock, the terrain began to get too rugged and the trees too close from each other, preventing vehicles to go further, even motorcycles.

The two keepers stopped, parked their motorcycles under a thicket, took their rifles and went to wait for the arrival of the troops at the rendezvous point they had defined with Sherman, located just next to a dry river bed.

When they arrived, the Slayers and the mercenaries went out of the vehicles weapons in hand and began deploying while Sherman communicated their status on the radio and asked about those of the teams that had left with the helicopter.

One of the teams that was transported in the ground vehicles left almost immediately, going eastward, while the other two, the Slayers and the keepers formed a single group.

The Slayers lowered their mask-like visors and put night vision goggles in front of their eyes.

Grady and Sembène were given theirs and after they put them on, they saw the world in different shades of green.

The formed company set out, following at a good distance and as cautiously as possible the achillobators.

X

The end of the trail being close, they had stopped running and were walking silently in a single line, with Blue ahead. She was holding her head upright and looking forward while her nostrils sniffed the air frequently.

They moved towards a rather steep slope and as they passed by an almost-complete skeleton of a _Giraffatitan_ near its base, a few bats flew over them.

Blue, Delta and Echo, focused on the Indominus' trail, ignored them but Charlie, mischievous and more curious, jumped and caught one in flight. She then showed it proudly to Blue, holding the bat in her mouth as the flying mammal struggled and vainly flapped its wings while letting out strident sounds.

Blue looked at the gift that her younger sister offered her but she refused it and continued, pushing Charlie to do the same with a little bark. Charlie dropped the bat on the ground and set forth.

Delta, in the middle of the line, wasn't interested by the bat but when Echo, at the back, passed by it while it tried to crawl away on the dead leaves, she leaned forward, not intending to let such easy prey go away, moreover if it had been ignored by her sisters.

The black _Achillobator_ grabbed the wounded bat between her teeth before crushing its frail body in her jaws and hurriedly swallowing it, like if she feared that the others would suddenly turn and come to steal her food.

X

Moments later, the humans reached the great skeleton and began to climb the slope, following a narrow trail that zigzagged to the top.

Turning at the level of one of the trail's bend, one could see through a hole in the canopy the waters of the sinuous Cartago, shining under the moonlight, the ghost village that had become the Jungle Trading Post, the dome of the large aviary in the gorge further downstream and the distant glow of Burroughs in the south.  
Another in the opposite direction looked out onto the northern jungle. It was in flames.

When they reached the top, the achillobators were about to emerge from the jungle at the edge of what appeared to be a body of water at the base of high rocky walls. Observing this on the screen of the tablet that they had brought with them and where were displayed the footage of the raptors cameras, Sherman gave orders.

The two teams of mercenaries then moved away from the Slayers, each on one side, going to take positions further and moving downwind with the greatest possible silence in the middle of the vegetation, using the latter to stay hidden.

The keepers and the Slayers took the same precautions but followed the path taken by the achillobators before turning in order to stay away from the edge that bordered the rocky bank.  
As Grady's animals had slowed down, walking slowly along the edge of the water body, an oval-shaped pool into which a high waterfall fell, they had them in sight again and followed them while staying in the undergrowth's total darkness.

Sherman saw a large fallen trunk nearby. It was long enough to hide them all and he pointed it to the rest of the company with his head.

As they approached, they noticed that on the side where they intended to go, the ground formed a hollow, deep enough for a man standing there to see over the trunk while being mostly hidden by it.  
They also saw that the trunk did not rest entirely on the ground, leaving cracks of various heights and that its state of decomposition was so advanced that the wood crumbled if one leaned too much on it.  
Here and there, wood-borers animals had dug so much that they had left real holes in the trunk that could be used as peepholes, allowing them to look at what was on the other side of the trunk.  
Having all these hidden observation points, they had no need to make the top of their heads appear over the top of the trunk and take the risk of being spotted, visually at least.  
About thirty meters separated their hiding place from the bank of the pool and between the two, there was almost no tree, giving them an unobstructed field of vision, and the trunk being lying on the top of an embankment, the grass and low plants between the bank and the base of the slope did not bothered them.

The achillobators appeared on their right, heading towards the creature for which they had come all this way.

The Indominus was lying on her side in the pool, bathing peacefully under the moon.  
She had her neck arched back with her maw wide open, letting a group of _Rhamphorhynchus_ , long-tailed pterosaurs of the size of a gull, land inside it and grab the pieces of flesh stuck between her teeth.

Hearing the achillobators coming, the Indominus interrupted her teeth-cleaning session and got up, pushing the pterosaurs to take off from her mouth and fly away.

As she came out of her bath and walked toward them while water ran down her sides, the achillobators stepped back a little, intimidated they were, but like if she wanted to reassure them and, to the surprise of the company, make them understand that were welcome, she made a series of cooing that were followed by a rumbling sound.

Seeing that the strange and disturbing creature they were facing was not hostile, the achillobators stopped moving back and stared at the Indominus while the humans watched the scene with attention. They were very surprised by her behaviour.

She momentarily turned away from the raptors and reached a pile of rocks near the edge of the pool that she began to dismantle.

Once she had moved aside enough rocks, she lowered a hand in the middle of the pile and when it came out, it was with the inert body of a young woman that wore the beige uniform of the J-SEC, the officer De Lorenzo, assigned to the quarantine paddocks at the time of the attack.

Carrying her delicately, the Indominus placed her halfway between her and the achillobators before stepping back and encouraging them to come closer, gently pushing the mauled body in their direction.

Cautiously, the achillobators advanced, with Blue in the front.

When they were a step or two from the body, the blue _Achillobator_ paused to look at the Indominus in the eyes, as if to check that it was not a trap.

Observing that she wasn't showing any sign of aggression, she began to sniff the body and lick the gaping wounds on it while her sisters gathered around.

Among the company, the idea of watching the raptors devour De Lorenzo's corpse was not a pleasant for the majority, especially for the keepers who wondered about how the achillobators would consider them after tasting human flesh for the first time and realizing that the human body was so fragile.

When Parker asked Sherman if they could attack now to prevent the raptors from further mutilating the victim, he was told that it was still too early and that Grady hadn't given his green light.

"We must let them do unfortunately," the leader of the Slayers said not without remorse. "The mission must not be compromised."

When Blue bit into the abdomen and arched back her neck after, tearing off a piece of flesh, she made Grady looked away for a moment and Sembène sufferred from retching.

After swallowing some pieces, Blue finally allowed her sisters to eat too.

They rushed to the body and as they ate, they sometimes jostled each other and squabbled, hissing and flapping their wings.

Echo, at the very bottom of the hierarchy, had great difficulty getting the pieces she desired and when she wanted to get closer to the body, Blue growled at her and the black _Achillobator_ didn't picked a quarrel with her. Her scar on the snout was there to remind her of what happened the last time she challenged Blue.

As the raptors began to dig their heads inside the victim's ribcage and torn abdomen, the Indominus took a step forward and let out a hoarse bark which draw the raptors' attention. Surprised, they raised their blood-stained heads.

Grady and Sembène had opened their eyes wide in astonishment when they heard the bark since it was an almost perfect imitation of that of another species of dinosaur they knew too well.  
Some of the Slayers, who also had recognized the barking, exchanged wary looks.  
The Indominus continued to bark to the achillobators.

"Those are neoraptors' calls," Butu muttered.

"Exactly," Grady confirmed.

"How is this possible? Does it have _Neoraptor_ DNA?" Parker asked.

"I don't think so. Language is not written in the genes. It isn't innate, it must be learned," Grady replied. "Maybe she is a good imitator, like the Common hill myna or the Lyrebird. Using _Neoraptor_ 's vocalizations to try to communicate with a closely-related species… Fascinating. Although her idea is not likely to succeed, I am forced to admit that she is a helluva of a clever girl."

"Troubling…" Sembène whispered. "Deeply troubling…"

"Yours are achillobators, right?" Decker asked. "It's like speaking Japanese to Vietnamese…"

"Rather English to a Neanderthal…" Sembène corrected.

The achillobators had interrupted their meal and raised their heads, looking confusedly at the Indominus, not knowing what she wanted of them while she continued to make various neoraptors' sounds, desperately trying to communicate with them.

"They're not understanding a goddam thing then," Kevin said.

"And it's frustrating her…" Sherman noted while his eyes had been locked on the Indominus since they arrived.

She was becoming impatient due to the lack of real answers, stricking the air with her tail and letting out more vehement calls which were sometimes interrupted with growls.

Then she had enough.

She suddenly put her hands on the ground and irritated, she rushed forward to chase the achillobators away.

They panicked and abandoned the body, though Delta grabbed a piece of gut in her mouth before clearing out, barely escaping the jaws of the Indominus which almost closed on her tail.

She did not bother to run after them but in their flight, the raptors rushed straight towards the trunk behind which the humans had hidden without their knowledge.

Seeing them rapidly getting closer, Parker got scared but as he was about to run away, Grady firmly grabbed him and told him to stand still.

"Don't move and keep calm!" He hissed to all the Slayers.

As the achillobators climbed the embankment, they all flattened themselves against the trunk and crouched a little, hoping that they wouldn't even notice them.

They heard claws scrape the bark and a shadow flew over Grady and Sembène.

They did not look up, it wasn't worth it since a blink of an eye later, Blue landed on the ground just a few meters in front of them, with the fan of feathers at the end of her tail almost whipping their faces.

Charlie and Echo jumped in their turn over or from the trunk itself, causing parts of it crumble under their weight, making shavings fall on those below.

When Delta stepped on the trunk, an entire part beneath her broke from the rest and fell straight towards Méndez.

Before the part fell on him, Arana promptly grabbed his comrade arm and pulled him toward him.  
If he hadn't done this, not only the piece of trunk would have fallen on Méndez skull, which would have made him fall, but Delta, dragged down by the trunk part's breaking, would have fallen right on him.

When she flattened on the ground, Grady and Sembène froze on the spot, hoping that she wouldn't turn around, not only fearing that she would be surprised and feel threatened, which could make her call her sisters back, but also that, on the opposite, one or several of their companions lose their control and shoot due to their happy-trigger nature.

Fortunately, Delta got up right away and ran to catch up with the rest of the pack, which had run towards the depths of the jungle, not even looking back.

The company watched her fade in the darkness of the undergrowth.  
They relaxed:

"Not only they don't answer but on top of that, they steal some food when they leave. You raised them well from what I can see," Kevin said sarcastically to Grady.

The latter did not said anything back and talked to Sherman instead:

"They're no longer in your firing line. You have free reign."

"Understood. Stay hidden behind this trunk."

Sherman ordered his men to gain their positions and he himself hid behind a big tree located just a few steps from the lying trunk.

He waited for all the Slayers to be in place before having a quick glance at the Indominus. She was staring at the pool with an unexpressive look and her back was facing them.

The leader of the Slayers turned his head and nodded to Decker, hidden behind a nearby tree.

His right-hand woman answered with a nod and he drew his sword, while his heartbeat accelerated and his breathing quickened.

He waited a moment, then, after biting his lower lip, he launched the attack with a hand sign.

However, when they left their hiding places, they noticed something that stopped them in their tracks: The Indominus was staring at them and didn't seemed to be surprised at all by their ambush.  
She had already lowered the front part of her body, spread her arms and opened her maw, ready to greet them.

In truth, she had heard them talking in a low voice during her attempt to communicate with the achillobators and had therefore faked to be unaware of their presence. She had planned to turn around only when they would came out of hiding to turn the element of surprise against them.

As they prepared to shoot, she unexpectedly turned around to rush into the pool and dive.

When the Slayers reached the edge, she was gone.

The two teams of mercenaries deployed north and south of the pool also came, but Sherman told them to not come closer to the pool, fearing that the Indominus was hidden at the bottom and that she waited for them to step into the water before attacking.

The helicopter reached their location and on board, one of the mercenaries directed a powerful searchlight towards the pool. The light even managed to illuminate its depths but seeing nothing, he informed Sherman by radio, but the latter and his men had been briefed about the Indominus' abilities and he suspected that she had camouflaged where the spotlight couldn't reach her.

He preferred to use a not-so-conventional way to protect themselves against a potential ambush:

"We better ensure that she doesn't dupe us… Grenades!" He ordered.

Several of the mercenaries as well as McNamara, Arana and Olsen nodded and threw grenades into the pool, either with their hands or with a launcher.

A few seconds later, while the helicopter remained above the pool, several smothered explosion sounds were heard and bubbles appeared where the grenades had sunk.

As the surface of the water calmed, InGen's troops looked for some blood or better, the Indominus' body. They didn't see anything.

"Where is she?" Parker wondered.

"Inside the mountain," Sherman said.

As the searchlight was still oriented towards the pool and the mercenaries scanned the surface of the water, the Slayers raised their visors and Sherman came closer to the edge to look at the pool.

A few steps from him, the two Tun-Si were looking thoughtfully at the waterfall and the jagged top of the mountain, like if they were apprehensive about having to search the Indominus inside, more than their comrades but not for the same reasons.

The keepers left the trunk and joined them.

They originally wanted to leave and search for the achillobators but as the Indominus just revealed an unsuspected aspect of her behaviour, Sherman preferred to keep Grady and Sembène with them until the end of the mission.

"For obvious reasons, we can't follow her there," Grady said as he looked at the water. "Is there another way that lead inside the mountain?"

"Yes, there is another," the leader of the Slayers answered in a mysterious tone without turning away.

Hearing Sherman's answer, Cortès frowned and then came to him in order to have a talk. Both whispered and from the bits that he keepers heard, it seemed that they were talking about a gorge that had been obstructed.

At the same time, the sound of an explosion came from further south and Sherman said to Cortès:

"Custer's team just cleared it."

They turned away from the pool and joined the rest of the company, leaving the helicopter and one of the mercenary teams that had gone with them to guard the pool and bring back De Lorenzo's remains to the vehicles.

Sherman led his men and the two keepers along the pool, heading towards the location of the explosion.

They saw that at its southern end, the pool was blocked by a pile of rocks whose creation resulted from the collapse of a part of the mountain's side centuries earlier due to erosion or an earthquake.  
If the pool existed, it was only thanks to the dam of rocks which had prevented the water poured by the waterfall to follow its natural course.  
Contained, it had filled the little cirque that was once there and when the level of the pool rose too high after a period of abundant rains, the overflow of water poured over the pile and flowed to the dry bed near which the vehicles had been parked downstream.

The company passed in front of the second team of mercenaries and Sherman ordered to half of it to follow them so that they could rather reinforce Custer's team.


End file.
